The Apocrypha

Minimalist Revising and Learning To Love The Dev Edit

Welcome back to the Apocrypha, faithful subscribers! Thank you for your patience with this very late Apocrypha essay; what a last month it’s been! I’ll be doubling up on November essays to make it up to you. Without further ado, let’s dive into the most fruitful (and the most dreaded) part of my writing process: the developmental edit. 

While every writer’s process looks different, most authors working in traditional publishing will eventually have to wrestle with the developmental edit letter. This is the letter your editor sends you after reading your first (or second, or third) draft, detailing what is working and what isn’t working from an bird’s-eye view. It’s when large-scale issues in character arcs, pacing, tone, and plot can be addressed, before getting into the nitty-gritty of sentence structure and word choice in the line edit.

If you’re me, the developmental edit is generally when your editor pats you on the head, tells you that you’ve written some wonderful sentences and elicited some wonderful emotions, then informs you that you will need to rewrite large chunks of the book to make it coherent. And, if you’re me, this is usually the part where you get completely overwhelmed by the perceived enormity of such an edit, and get so in your head about it you freeze.

Some authors relish in the developmental edit, claiming that’s the point in the process where pages of words start to feel like a book, and some authors, like me, are much more invigorating by the unfettered play and possibility of the drafting stage, but either way, I am here to bestow upon you everything I’ve learned about making developmental edits manageable and even (gasp!) enjoyable.

You Do Not Need An Elaborate System

When I was staring down my first developmental edit letter, I reached out to more established author friends for any tips and tricks about breaking the feedback into manageable pieces. This, to me, seemed key to getting through the edit in a timely manner without losing my sanity. My friends responded with enthusiasm, sharing color-coded spreadsheets sorted by type of edit and the amount of effort making that edit would expend, plus highlighting which character arcs would be affected by the edit. Other had regimented schedules about how many pages they were going to edit in a day, and they seemed to be able to stick to them.