After writing a powerful story with outstanding outlines, you can read about how to outline your book here, you need to let your work rest for at least two weeks and even up to a year. When you are ready, you go back to your work and get ready to edit it.
The things you would need are proper formatting, a printer and a red pen. Ensure you format your book with 2.0 as the line spacing so you can jot in-between, then use a wide margin of 1 and the font of Times New Roman in size 12 for easy visibility.
Once you have formatted and printed your work, ensure you have an open mind. I suggested a printed copy because it would be easier to flip between pages no matter how bulky they are, compared to having it on your computer.
With your open mind, read like it is new to you, don’t skip any line and ensure you circle any area that doesn’t flow or make sense to you. For typo errors, circle them so you do not forget. Please make sure you are not adding or subtracting things yet, just noting them down.
If you have a friend that is interested in your work and you are confident enough to share, do go ahead and ensure you ask them questions about particular scenes you have read that is not making sense to you. Once they give their feedback, note it down. This process should take 2 days to 2 weeks.
Once you are done sorting and noting all the areas the dialogue should have been longer, the character from deviating from itself for no plotted reason, etc, start again and start filling in areas that don’t add up properly. For me, I usually leave some of my chapters unborn and skip to next interesting part; so maybe you want to do some developmental edits.
I hope you understand what it means to self edit and how to go about it.
Thanks so much for reading, it only gets better.
