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Learn the prep work you can do before handing your book off to an editor.
In this first episode of a three-part-series, Suzy dives into an overview of developmental editing. What is it? What can you do before handing your draft over to an editor? Do you need an editor to reach your writing goals? All this and more is answered this week!
Mentioned in the Episode:
Levels of Editing Guide Free Download
Jane Friedman’s Blog: A Writer’s Secret Weapon: Add a Listening Pass to Your Editing Arsenal
🌟 Grab your spot in Suzy’s Inner Circle at www.suzyvadori.com/innercircle
Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
125. Developmental Editing Your Book (Part 1 of 3)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Show, Don’t Tell writing podcast with me, suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step-by-step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away, as I host successful writers who share a behind-the-scenes look at their own [00:00:30] writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages, giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger.
Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn. On this show, I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing Oh my goodness, I am so excited about this podcast series, [00:01:00] Developmentally Edit Your Own Book, because there is so much that I have learned in the past decade studying with some of the best editors, book coaches in the world, agents, and I really want you to have all that information because it gets t- you know, I work on about 100 books a year in some part and parcel.
I work on about 20 books as a full developmental edit a year, which is a lot to hold in my brain, and the feedback that I get time and time again is that it was [00:01:30] incredibly valuable what I went through. And I have a lot of systems, so I’m gonna share them with you. It doesn’t replace … the idea of developmentally editing your own book isn’t going to replace paying a second set of eyes to do this, but I do know that it’s a huge investment, and so some of this work you can do upfront and do yourself, and anything that you can do to gain perspective is going to be absolutely amazing.
And it also means if you can do some of this work yourself in terms of a developmental edit before you send it to [00:02:00] your developmental editor, then they can help you with so much more and get a lot deeper than if they’re just helping you with the surface issues that are really obvious, because we only s- have so much time budgeted, and we can only give writers so many layers to work on at one time.
So that’s what this series is about. I hope you super enjoy it. Today, I’m gonna be talking about what is developmental editing and all the things you need to do before you start, because you need to do a little bit of prep. And the first thing I want you to [00:02:30] do, I’m gonna get a notebook handy ’cause this is gonna be a bit of a workshopy podcast episode.
I want you to think about what your wildest writing dream is. This, you know, the Show Don’t Tell writing podcast is a place to think big. I’m not here to tell you, I mean, I’ll share real information. I’m not here to tell you that it’s very difficult and you should give up because I have seen people push through, and the people who succeed, I’ve got tons of episodes on this, go search for them, but the [00:03:00] people who actually succeed in the writing process are the ones who do the most learning and the ones who are strategic about it, and this is no different.
Paying attention to your entire book from a developmental editing perspective, I’m gonna talk about what that is in a second, is really important, but what’s more important is what is your wildest writing dream? The reason I want you to define that right now is because depending on what your goals are- Your work and willingness to invest in a developmental edit will [00:03:30] change.
If your goal is to share it with friends and family, your memoir of your life, and move on and you don’t care if anybody ever reads it, cool. You probably aren’t gonna put as much work into it as if you want to break out and share and start a conversation with the world, right? And go for different levels of publishing, all of those things.
So, so knowing what your wildest dream is, and be honest with yourself, please. A lot of times writers will tell me, “Oh, I just, I don’t care. I want, I wanna [00:04:00] write it for myself.” But if they’re really honest with themselves and dig deep, the answer isn’t that. The answer is they secretly hope, even without stating it or without doing the work, that somebody somewhere is gonna find it and tell them that they’re amazing and that they’ve struck gold, right?
That’s what we hope will happen, but it won’t happen unless you put this work in. So be honest with yourself. What’s your wildest writing dream? Keep this handy. I’m gonna talk about some more [00:04:30] things that you need to do before you do your developmental edit. This is work that I do with each and every client bef- whether they realize it or not, before I start reading their books because I can’t give them good advice on where it should go unless I understand what they’re trying to do.
So the second thing I want you to think about is what work are you honestly willing to put in to get that, to that goal? ‘Cause I guarantee that your idea that you came up with, it’s actually good enough So people come to me all the [00:05:00] time and say, “I have this idea for a book. Is it good enough for a book?”
Yeah, of course it is. You have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours thinking about it, writing about it, working on this book. This idea has kept you up at night maybe, right? You wanna talk about it 24/7. Nobody wants to listen, by the way. I do, I wanna listen, but a lot of people in our lives don’t necessarily have the capacity to listen to our ideas all the time, so we write them.
And so I know that the idea is good enough. It’s in the execution [00:05:30] of the idea, right? And it’s in the execution and the details of how you actually deliver that idea that we’re gonna talk about during the developmental editing process. And I wanna tell you, you know, you’ve got this. Your voice is the only one like it.
Let it shine. You are the only person who could write this book your way. I could, in fact, give you the outline for my next novel, and I could hand it to everybody who listens to this podcast, thousands of people, and away you’d [00:06:00] go, and in a year we could meet back right here on the podcast and we could read each other stories.
And I can guarantee you that we wouldn’t have one sentence the same even though I gave you my plot, right? The only person who can write this book is you, so the only person who can do the work is you. I know I’m having a lot of discussion sort of in a broader sense with AI and everything else coming up, like, how do I get my story out there?
Can AI write it for me? I can tell you that it can’t. And the reason that it can’t is because only your brain can come up with the details. It [00:06:30] can, it can come up with an outline. It can give you some ideas. Um, be careful if you’re using AI, by the way. I don’t want to sound like this is an endorsement for AI.
It is not. Do not use it to write, and the reason is because it steals from large language model, which was fed by pirated books, including mine, that were stolen. And so it can actually, if you’re asking it to write something for you which is generative, or if you’re asking it to edit something for you by saying, “Rewrite this and make it sound better,” it can steal from any book in the world [00:07:00] and you will be plagiarizing without even knowing it, which means that you do not own the copyright.
Okay, that’s my little aside on AI there. Okay, so your voice is the only one like it. Let it shine and go for it. So what exactly is a developmental edit? It’s, like, one of those things. Sometimes it’s called a substantive edit, sometimes it’s called a structural edit, but it is always tackled on the completed draft.
You really can’t do a developmental edit of a partial, or at least I [00:07:30] don’t do it of a partial. I wouldn’t do it … I mean, I might do a three-chapter review of the beginning of a book to see if it’s gonna hook people, but I don’t know if I don’t see the whole book whether or not you even started the book in the right place.
I can’t tell you that until you see the shape of the whole book, right? So the developmental edit considers the book as a whole, the product that you’ve produced, and whether or not it reaches your goals. So it’s a big picture assessment of your book’s readiness for readers, and that’s important because it doesn’t mean that it isn’t [00:08:00] good or that your ideas aren’t good, but here on the Show Don’t Tell Writing podcast, we always flip things to look at your reader and say, “Is it gonna work in their brains,” right?
So given your idea and given your goals, have you done everything that you can to connect with your readers? That’s what a developmental edit will tell you from a professional. I want to just talk for a minute, and I’ll drop a link in the show notes to a downloadable guide at Suzyvidorri.com/editlevels because it’s a little bit confusing.
So if you’re new to this space and you wanna know, and you’re talking to different [00:08:30] editors, you’re looking to hire an editor or it’s confusing, developmental editing is not grammar and spelling, okay? I personally do a line edit or a proofread and a proofread for the first 30 pages of any developmental edit that I do because I wanna show you, I work with a lot of newer writers, I wanna show them if they have some sort of bad habits or some repeated things that they get wrong all the time, or that are breaking conventions or that aren’t effective.
And so I do it for the first little while. So for example, if the writer isn’t strong on dialogue and is [00:09:00] making some mistakes with the actual physical piece of that, then I will tell them that. I will correct it for 30 pages, and then I will show them the rules, and they can go and correct it themselves for the rest of it.
But I just wanna be clear, a developmental edit is not a proofread and/or a line edit. It is not about spelling and grammar, and in fact, many developmental editors don’t do any line editing at all The difference really is we’re commenting on the big picture, and these episodes that I’m recording now are gonna show you all the different places, but it is [00:09:30] not about spelling and grammar.
And so you can grab that guide if you wanna understand all the different levels of editing. And, you know, in terms of me, I’ve now developmentally edited over 200 books, and my whole shtick is that I break down complex writing concepts into manageable steps so that you can apply them to your book right away, and this will be no exception.
Some of the books that I’ve worked on over the past decade have gone on to, you know, do incredible things, six-figure deals, big five [00:10:00] publishing, published in many languages, and some of them have created whole careers for the writers in terms of, you know, independently publishing and independently publishing many books and making money from that and becoming a public speaker on a topic.
There’s all kinds of paths that these books have gone down, but it all starts in the same place, which is, you know, what is your big writing dream? What work are you willing to do to put into it, and what are the things that you can actually focus on to get there? Because y- you’ve heard me talk about this before, and I [00:10:30] think it’s really important, the problem with doing this type of work yourself, and we’re gonna try to get around it today, and I’m gonna teach you some ways to be objective, is that we can’t see our own writing mistakes.
So you’ve got this beautiful story exploding in your brain, and then you write it down, and you think that you’ve written the Mona Lisa when maybe you’ve written stick figures, right? We can tell when we are becoming an artist. I’m not an artist, by the way. I write a lot of stick figures, and I don’t know how [00:11:00] to paint the Mona Lisa.
But if I wanted to paint the Mona Lisa, I would go and take some lessons, and then I would learn all the things, you know, light, color, shape, form, whatever the things are in art that I’d need to learn, and that would be really obvious to me when I was making progress. The problem with writing is that we can’t see our own stick figures because when we read it back, our brains are so cool, by the way, our brains actually fill in the details as if we’d written the Mona Lisa, and we pat ourselves on the back and we say, “That’s amazing.
Good job, me.” And the problem with that is [00:11:30] when another reader reads your work, they are going to see the stick figures if you haven’t put in the work or learned the skills. They’re gonna see just stick figures, and they’re not gonna get it. And so a one-star review on a book that’s written like that when you haven’t put in the work to make it into the Mona Lisa, the problem with that is that you actually
You know, a one-star review doesn’t mean that they didn’t think that your idea was good. Remember I said your idea is good enough. I can guarantee that. It doesn’t mean that your idea wasn’t good. It [00:12:00] means that you haven’t put in the work and all they’ve read is stick figures. In this series of episodes, I’m gonna be sharing the most important criterion that I use to assess the big picture and the scene elements in a draft, along with tips on how to gain perspective, which is what we’re talking about today So first things first, before you even start your developmental draft, these are questions that I ask the writers that I’m working with, and I encourage you to answer these for yourself because if you can’t answer these questions, nothing that you put or criticize for yourself matters.[00:12:30]
I wanna know, number one, why are you writing this particular book at this particular moment in your life? Why? And I encourage writers to write them on a page on this because we get deeper, and I’ve had people discover that that book that they’re writing about, um, serpent creatures is actually about their childhood.
I’ve had people discover that that book that they’re writing about multi-generational sea people is actually about their relationship with their family. There, there are things that we do [00:13:00] subconsciously that we naturally are exploring as we write, and it’s important that you know what they are so that when you are actually doing this developmental edit for yourself, you can see it for what it is.
You can see it for what the readers are going to see, and you can see how it’s working in your own life and how your brain actually came up with it or why you’re writing it that way. The second thing I want you to answer is what do you want readers to take away from your book? So this is related to theme and other things that you may have learned about.
I like to flip it again to the [00:13:30] reader and say, when the reader is done, how do you want them to think, feel, act, do in the world after they’ve read your book? And knowing that and continually checking back to see that everything in the book points them in that direction is really helpful. This takeaway is gonna sound cheesy.
It doesn’t have to be seen by anybody but you and your editor, your book coach, whoever you’re working on this book with. It’s not a public statement, so it can be really, really simple. But define what it [00:14:00] is that you hope that your readers will take away after they’ve read your book, and that will help you figure out as you go through this developmental edit what scenes actually belong and what scenes are completely extraneous or tangential or don’t belong in your book And then number three on the first things first checklist, what does success to you look like?
Again, what is your big, wild, crazy dream? Your book is a unique expression of you, and any revisions that you do should lean [00:14:30] into your originality and not make it sound like everything else out there on the market. So I’m not here to give you a template. I’m not here to evaluate all these things. It’s really important that you know this about yourself.
This is where the real success comes in. This is where the real satisfaction comes in. This is where people call me, email me, text me and say, “You know, my life has completely changed because I wrote this book, and I couldn’t be more grateful.” I don’t know how your life is gonna change, listeners, but I can [00:15:00] guarantee you that if you finish your book and start that conversation with the world that you want, your life will change.
And it starts right here with recognizing what it is that makes you unique and not just memorizing every writing technique out there or trying to write to market. It’s you. You are the special sauce in this book. It’s you, and so don’t discount that as you go along, okay? And this whole developmental editing process is meant to evaluate have you done what you actually wanted to do?[00:15:30]
And if you have, then your life is about to take a really fun ride So how do you gain perspective? There are some things that you can do to gain perspective. Remember I was saying earlier in this podcast episode that when we look at our own writing, we don’t see the stick figures, we build the Mona Lisa.
So the problem is you’re really close to it, and your brain’s gonna fill things in. It’s also the reason you can’t proofread effectively your own work, because my biggest thing in proofreading on my own [00:16:00] work is missing words because I skip them. In my brain, I just skip ahead, I don’t type them, and when I read it back to myself, I actually fill them in, so I don’t see it.
I can see it in other people’s work, by the way. I can’t see it in my own, and that’s the bane of being an editor, is that we do things for other people that we can’t do for ourselves. So how do you gain perspective on your own work? I encourage you before you start this developmental editing process or before you start employing any of this, that you actually take the time [00:16:30] to gain some perspective and use some of these techniques.
The first technique that I’m gonna suggest is let time pass. Now, this is the one that’s the most common out there that people say put it in a drawer for, you know, three months or a year. Okay, cool. If you are anything like me and you have an incredible memory, it takes, like, five years for me to forget something, if I even forget something then.
It’s funny, I, you know, I’m at the point in my career where I’m working on books four, five, six with writers, and they’re like, “I don’t expect you to remember something from the first [00:17:00] book,” but I do, and I don’t need to read them again, right? So for me, I can’t really use the time factor. It doesn’t work. But for most people, you might find that even a few weeks allows you to get perspective.
Now, one of two things happens when we read our own work. We either do what I said before, we think we’ve written the Mona Lisa, we’ve got these rose-colored glasses, or the opposite sometimes happens as well, which is we’re so critical of our own work and we’re so tired of it that we think it’s terrible, and we [00:17:30] think everything’s terrible.
So if either of these things are true for you, I’d love to hear it in the comments of the podcast. Let me know what happens to you when you read your own work. But sometimes it’s actually really cool after some time has passed and you read something, you’re like, “Wow, that was really good,” right? And you’re a little bit chuffed about it.
So letting time pass is a great idea, um, but it’s not always practical, and I know we’re all impatient. We all want to publish tomorrow. So it’s not the easiest one to employ. For those who have a longer term plan [00:18:00] and are working on several projects, sometimes this is a really good strategy. But if you can’t let time pass or f- or if your brain doesn’t really let go of it, um, and it doesn’t help you, then there’s a few quick things you can do.
Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the device that you’re reading it on. So if you, if you are Writing on a laptop? Maybe read it on your phone or a tablet. If you are writing on a laptop, maybe you print it off and read it that way. If you’re writing in a notebook, maybe you scan it, [00:18:30] you print it, uh, you type it up, and then you read it that way.
Whatever doesn’t feel like writing so that you are not tempted to change it or be critical, so that it feels like somebody else’s work. I know that it sounds really crazy, but it’s amazing, but this does work. It makes you feel like you’re reading somebody else’s work, and it can give you that perspective.
In fact, you could even just change the look of it. Like, for example, if you’re writing on a word processor and you change the color, you change the size, you change the [00:19:00] font. Some people like to read it in comic sans or something, like, completely ridiculous. It doesn’t feel like your own work, and so you can gain perspective and all of a sudden you feel like you’re reading somebody else’s book and you can judge it with a little tiny bit of distance.
The one that I also love is to do a listening pass, and I’ll drop the link to– in the show notes to an article that I wrote on Jade Friedman, which is how to set this up on your phone. But this has, like, been a game changer for me, and the way that I get [00:19:30] around not being objective with my own work is to listen to it.
So I write a scene, and then I listen to it played back in Siri’s monotone voice, typically on three-times speed because I am impatient and it’s my own work. I know it, so I don’t really need to know. But you can kind of hear it in a different way. It sounds like somebody else’s book, and I can hear those– I can hear the pacing.
I can hear when it’s slow. I can hear when my mind is drifting, and I can also hear when it’s really good. So those are some techniques to gain perspective, and I [00:20:00] highly recommend that you do that. So whatever you’re doing today, change it up for when you read it back because you will not be able to do this developmentally editing pro- this developmental editing process if you don’t somehow gain distance or perspective.
Let me know in the comments what you choose to do. Okay. So then you’re gonna read it. I’m gonna give you lots of techniques over the next few, but I suggest that you read it end to end somehow. A listening pass is a great way to do this. I like to go for a walk. Sometimes I [00:20:30] go for a six-hour walk and do a listening pass, and then I dictate notes to myself on my phone.
And I can tell you which pieces of my book are slow. I can tell you which pieces of my book I’m like, “Wow, that was a huge surprise,” or, “Oh my gosh, I got choked up.” So we’re gonna talk about all of that, but yeah, just take a quick read of it and don’t think too hard. You’re gonna be going through it again.
But remind yourself what is in your book. You can’t see the whole shape of your book without doing this, so read it. And you’re gonna need to have, you know, [00:21:00] some really current knowledge of what you actually had in the book to do some of the exercises that are gonna be in the next episode I’m gonna go on in this episode to talk about your book’s big picture opportunities and only do number one, and then the rest are gonna be in the next episode because it’s so much.
And this is what I realized when I actually hived it off and tried to do it in a one-hour presentation. I think it was an hour and 15 minutes. It was just so much information. So the next thing I want you to do before you do anything [00:21:30] else is write down any known issues. Okay? Write down what you think.
Sometimes when they ask writers what they know they need to fix, it’s the answer. So trust your gut. Don’t be hard on yourself, but write it down. We’re gonna compare it to all the things that you find, but don’t discount the things that you inherently know need to get done I wish I could bottle this up, this, this experience for newer writers who are writing their first book, and I talk about this a lot, because I’m trying to define it, but there’s something that [00:22:00] actually happens when we write our first book that makes it take way longer than it should, and that is this moment where we wallow.
We know something in our brains, we know or in our gut, we know that we haven’t worked on something in our book. We know that there’s a piece that’s weak. There’s something that we haven’t done. There’s a structural change that we know will make the book better, and we’re not doing it. If you can write that thing down and address it, we can put it all on the table.
I had a boss once who used to say, “If there’s a [00:22:30] problem, it’s a pig. Put the pig on the table. Describe the pig.” Right? So put this known issue on the table. We will look at it in comparison to everything else. If you’re just being mean to yourself, that’ll be clear. But what happens when writers actually write their second book is they write their book faster, and the reason that they write their book faster is, yes, because they’ve learned a ton, and they don’t have to learn as much, but it’s actually because they do this.
When they [00:23:00] have a known issue, typically for your second, your third, your fifth, your 10th, your 40th book, you do it. You don’t spend that time wondering if you should do it. You don’t look for shortcuts. You do the work because you can’t finish a book that is going to be read and well-received and understood and not stick figures but actually the Mona Lisa without doing this work.
So if there’s something that you know, write it down, and then I will meet you in the next episode here to talk [00:23:30] about your big-picture opportunities, and that’s it. These are all the steps that you should do before you even attempt to tackle your developmental edit yourself. And so I’ll just recap for you.
There are six things. I want you to think about your wildest writing dream and write it down, talk about it, think about it, all of these things. Let’s not play small. You have spent hundreds, thousands of hours on this book. Do not discount it by saying, “Oh, I don’t care,” or, “I’m just writing for [00:24:00] myself,” unless that’s truly true.
Okay? Number two, think about what work you’re willing to put in and maybe write down some commitments so that when you do this developmental edit and you’re wondering, like, ’cause you’re gonna get overwhelmed. This is a lot. It’s a lot. I got overwhelmed just even realizing all the things that I do for people subconsciously and putting it all together.
It’s a lot. That’s why I’m breaking it into three episodes. Number three, write a page on your why. Why are you writing this particular book at this [00:24:30] particular moment in time? You’re gonna discover things there that are really important to this developmental editing process. Just do it free write. Don’t worry about what it says.
Nobody has to read it but you Okay, number four, what do you want your readers to take away from the book? How do you want them to think, feel, act, do? What do you want them to do when they’re done? This is really important. It helps you figure out which scenes belong and which scenes do not, or it could belong in a different book.
Number five, what does your success [00:25:00] look like? Are you wanting to sell a million copies and, you know, tour? Are you wanting to become a public speaker out of this? Are you wanting to start a community? Are you wanting to reach one person? I don’t know. What does success look like to you? That’s gonna– It’s kind of tied to how much work you’re willing to put in.
Number six, make a list of all the known issues, those things in your gut that you think might be wrong with your book, write them down. We’re gonna use this after you’ve used [00:25:30] my techniques in the next episodes to fully vet your book to see, were you right? I don’t know the answer, but we’re gonna find out.
If you are listening to this live, then the next episode may not be there yet, but that’s okay ’cause you got six things to do before you get there. So make sure you come back and listen to the next ones, and if you are listening to this after the fact and those episodes are already live, then keep going, but make sure you do this work first.
See you in the next episode.[00:26:00]
Thanks for tuning in to the Show, Don’t Tell writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or the book that you’re planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You can subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening to show how much you enjoy the show.
That’s how [00:26:30] other listeners will find us. Also, visit Suzyvadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list, where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about all the upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. Want my eyes on your writing?
Submit a page of your current draft for a chance to come on the podcast at the link in the show notes. I’d love to chat with you about your writing in my always positive, incredibly supportive way so that you can make [00:27:00] great strides towards your writing goals. I’m here to cheer you on. Remember, that book you’re writing is gonna open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make that it the absolute best it can be.
See you again right here next week