We all know that writing is primarily re-writing. On rare occasions, a few perfect snippets of prose may manifest magically on the first draft—but not often. And by the time you’ve edited and polished all the context around one of those spontaneous pearls, it may no longer even fit.

There’s so much fastidious effort to apply to your words—and good writers dig in and savor the challenge.

But when to do it?

There’s lots of advice out there that says to plow through the entire first draft, resisting the urge to edit at all.

As an article I read recently put it: “let loose and steam through it as fast as possible. This is not the time for reflection, editing or perfection. Making the prose tight and effective comes later, during the editing process – what’s important now is getting the story out.”

This approach assumes that you’ve complete a fairly detailed outline prior to starting that draft at all.

But no single approach works for everyone.

The traditional approach of constructing a detailed outline, writing a first draft with no editing whatsoever, and then conducting a series of editing passes for structure, language, continuity, and spelling and grammar, has just never worked for me. It feels stiff and constrictive.

What works for me is edit as you go.

Here’s how I do it:

First of all, I work with no outline—only the barest high-level concept. I think that’s important to mention, because writing that way engenders an entirely different process for creating a novel. Which is probably why the “three-passes” approach can’t work for me, or for people who write as I do.

And I write on a word processor. I don’t think this sort of approach could work writing longhand. Too much revision is constantly going on.

My novels are narrated in relatively short segments. Those segments may be part of a larger chapter or stand on their own. In either case, I build the book, segment by segment. Therefore, each segment is an individual work. And I treat them that way. I edit each segment over and over, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, until it feels right. Then I quit for the day. And then I come back the next morning and work through that segment all over again, in the same exacting detail. Sometimes for several days, even if the segment is just two or three pages long. Only when I feel I can’t change another thing do I move onto starting the next segment.

And each day that I work on that next segment, I always begin my session by re-reading the “already completed” segment just before it. I confess that I occasionally do tiny additional polishes even then.

I’ve found that writing this way has many benefits.

It really gets you to focus. On the moment. The words. The cadences. The flow. The voices. The immediacy of the story. It draws you not only into the prose itself, but into the cerebral machinations and the flickering moods of each character. Into how a conversation moves, what is said and how, the subtle differences in speech patterns from one character to the next. How description is balanced alongside narration and dialogue. How the words sound.

Writing this way is also great protection against writer’s block. It quells fear—if you know you’re going to spend countless hours re-writing and fine-tuning your prose as soon as you write it, then you’re far less likely to let fear of poor writing in the first draft halt your progress. You don’t have to sit there for months working on a manuscript where every sentence can potentially make you cringe.

Thinking ahead

And all the while that you’re laboring over a given segment, great insights inevitably pop up about the next segment, or a segment somewhere down the road. And when these ideas manifest, you pause for a moment and note them, right there in the Word document, probably at the end of the manuscript, approximately where you’re likely to run into them when you need them. This is so important when you’re writing without an outline.

Theoretically, you need time between each segment to figure out where you go from there. But I find that those insights bubble up, spontaneously and intuitively, while you’re consciously focused on editing the segment at hand. They have to. Because focusing so hard on what’s happening in the moment that you’re editing—seeing how the story is transpiring, what exactly is being said and done—that immersion necessarily sets off some other part of the brain into imagining what might come next. It’s a strangely powerful recursive process. Focusing on the details of the immediate needs of your text triggers your subconscious to create adventures to come later.

Finally, writing this way can help you craft an effective ending to your story. This was abundantly true for my most recent novel, Enemy Queen, which was published on May 12, 2020. Although Enemy Queen could probably have been labeled “a dark satire,” or “a licentious comedy of manners,” it did include a murder mystery as one of its elements, and so had been characterized for publicity purposes as “an erotic thriller.”

Keeping the Mystery Alive

And although this may seem implausible, I wrote nearly the entire book without any idea how to resolve that murder mystery. Probably because I was enjoying the process of writing it so much, this dereliction of planning didn’t really bother me. And I think, in retrospect, my not knowing how the murder mystery would be resolved enabled me to write it in a manner that enhanced the suspense for readers too, since both they and I were equally uncertain about the outcome.

Many ideas for possible endings bubbled up spontaneously while I wrote. None of them had made a convincing argument that it was the definitive choice.

Inevitably, though, I reached a point where it became clear that the novel had only forty or fifty pages to go, and I needed to commit to an ending. I had to finally figure out how the murder mystery would be resolved. So, I took a few days off from writing, and just thought about it. I thought about it while I took long hikes with my dog. I thought about it while I showered and shaved. Even while I tried to fall asleep each night.

The problem was that there were so many possibilities—and each of them made as much sense as the next.

Making the Decision

Ironically, in the end, it was the fact that I had edited the book as I went, that ultimately turned out to be the key to my decision.

Any of the possible plot outcome I’d come up with would have worked as a narrative device. But having actually written the book rather than just outlined it, editing as I went, the novel had acquired a tone, a perspective, a sensibility, a choir of voices—it had become a fully-formed, actualized being of its own.

And when I finally considered the entity the book had become, it was clear, at that moment, that only one ending would work for that unique novel.

Of course, when a novel is finished, I go back to the beginning and make one more editing run before deeming it ready for submission. Generally, there’s not much left to be done though, other than catching typos, inconsistent character names, and other minor stuff.

That is, until it gets into the hands of a professional editor.

Then the fun starts all over again.