The Power of Editing
*originally published in the July 2018 edition of Hear Ye, Hufflepuff*

The first draft of anything won't be perfect. Accepting that is the first step towards peace. 

But what do you do once you have accepted your draft's imperfection? Well, you edit, of course! Different projects will take a different number of edits. Here are a few tips on what to do next:

1. Put the draft aside.
   • The first step when you finish writing something is to stop looking at it. Directly after finishing your work is when you're the most critical and the least objective. You've been looking at it for too long. So take a break. Be it an afternoon or a week, set the draft aside and do your best not to dwell on it.
2. Reread it with fresh eyes.
   • When your time away from it is over, go back and read your draft again with fresh eyes. This time, just read it. Don't change anything. Don't mark anything. Just read.
3. Reread it again. Make a list of things you might want to change.
   • Take a bit after you've finished the initial read, and read your draft again. This time, make a list of things you may want to change. You can do this by highlighting things or making margin notes or whatever works for you. Don't change the things yet, just list them out/mark them.
4. Go through it and change the big "problems."
   • You might want to take another break before beginning this step. When you do, go through and change the big "problems" that you marked. Don't like a certain way you wrote one of your characters? Decided to change the setting or the time line? Need to add a transition scene? This is where you do those big changes.
5. Go through it again and change the small "problems."
   • These changes are the grammatical and sentence structure changes—small things that you decide to fix. This read and edit will require a fine-toothed comb, so to say, but will help significantly improve things more than their small size implies.
6. Repeat from step 1.
   • Now you're ready to wait a bit, then reread and decide if there are any other changes you'd like to make! Remember that you can always go back again if you feel you need to, but you should also accept that you've done something well and embrace your success!

Good luck, and happy writing!