Planning Strategies in Editing.

Maybe I'm weird, but I've always liked the editing stage of writing the best. For me, the hard work is in the writing and it bogs me down. I love to plan out stories and share my ideas. I want everyone to read what I have to say because I really do believe in my series and I feel like it's innovative in the genre and that the characters are likable and all of that. But writing? Takes too long and takes a lot of commitment.

Maybe I just have trouble with commitment? That's something to take up somewhere else.

But editing? That's the good part of this craft. That's the step where I get to take all of the work that's gone into my novel and enjoy it... And then tear it apart. I get to analyze things like punctuation usage and repetition of words and sentence structure. But that's just part of it. That's the "boring" grammar stuff that you do on the first pass through. That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the really fun part of editing.

Themes and motifs and foreshadowing and symbols and metaphors... All of that fun stuff. Plus the nitty-gritty details of character growth throughout their arc and consistency of their actions and all of the intricacies that those details include.

And that is where my planning techniques as editing techniques come in handy. I've recently fallen in love with making revision outlines. Where I go back through each chapter of an already completed novel and map out all of the plot points, taking note of characters coming in and out of the scenes, locations that are visited, themes and motifs that pop up in each chapter as well as any instances of foreshadowing. It lets me see what's being focused on and what I need to make stronger.

I also like charts. And calendars, which I guess are sort of charts in their own rights? So I made these things that I am actually really, really proud of:

 So, first there is this one. With notes on colors and how they morph throughout each book, as well as the series as a whole. There's notes on other symbols that appear and then in the orange at the bottom are three main motifs that are in each of the three Sky of... novels -- including ones that tie together across the trilogy. On the back there are more specifics that break things down by character, but that was too specific to share online, I thought. Plus, it takes all of the mystery away.  [;

And then there's this one. Ignore the scribbles on the calendar; it's still in draft mode. I was trying to figure out timing for some chapters, as well as the space in between said chapters and some things had to be moved around to make things right.

Pacing is part of that editing fun part.

Yeah. I'm pretty excited about everything I've done for this novel so far, even when it leads to entire chapters being trashed and rewritten from scratch. All of the work that goes into it is only making it stronger than it used to be.

What are your thoughts on editing? Do you have pages and pages of strange documents that won't make sense to anyone other than you?