My High-Impact Editing Method to Fix a Book Fast

Editing my Last Book Broke Me (and Why This One Won’t)

How am I going to get a rough draft beta-reader ready in 21 days? I’m taking off weekends + 4th of July… which actually means I have 14 days eeeeep.

I’ll get there by knowing exactly what to fix, and narrowing down the highest impact items.

Unlike last time.

With my first (unpublished) book, I thought editing was similar to drafting: you start at the beginning and work your way chronologically through the book with a specific goal in mind (say, theme or conflict or dialogue). I worked through draft after draft, month after month, until the 4th draft when I was horrified that the book still had massive structural issues.

Then I gave up.

I stopped writing for many months after that. I spiraled, I wondered what was wrong with me. I wondered if I picked the wrong dream. If all of this was a mistake. If I was really the type of person who finishes projects, or if I was that caricature of a writer I see in shows- the lazy, entitled brute who lazes by a lake all day ‘writing’ but never gets anything done.

Maybe I didn’t have it me.

But maybe I do. And if so, I have to try a new approach. So I picked up Intuitive Editing by Tiffany Yates Martin. She recommends finding the largest issues in your story and spot-fixing them before doing a full-pass through the book. Okay, I’m in.

But what are my book’s issues? I read through my rough draft and took a bunch of notes on problems that stood out. See my Scrivener screenshot below:

I work with Claude.ai and ChatGPT to help uncover these issues, and I get a list of issues from the Intuitive Editing book.

I then categorized all my book’s issues into highest, medium, and low impact.

• High Impact: The story does not exist without these changes

• Medium Impact: The story exists, but it’s missing limbs and losing blood

• Low Impact: The story has legs, but it’s uglier without these changes

Below is a screenshot:

Not pictured: the Low Impact Section

Cool. Now I have five core issues that MUST be fixed ASAP.

1. The villain’s intentions

   1. He’s currently an arrogant, unsettlingly hot drama queen who like… flounces around in pretty outfits lol. His motives should sharpen Emily (main girlie) and create the main tension in the book, but right now he just smells nice and broods.

2. How/why the Veilstone (aka the McGuffin) works

   1. I won’t even bore you with this. But that’s the thing. The item Emily is trying to get… it’s boring! Yikes.

3. Making the main character active instead of passive

   1. For the midpoint (a crucial scene) Emily arrives at a palace where she eats, gets spa treatments, talks to a Queen, and is handed the next clue as a gift. No price. No real resistance. No hard choice. Just vibes and bubble baths.

4. How long the story takes and how that escalates the stakes

   1. I currently don’t know if the story takes 5 days or 5 years. Lol.

5. Making a killer opening

   1. Right now the book starts in Ohio with Emily working a desk job, and the reader has no idea for quite a while that they’re about to read a fantasy/romance. That’s not a good start.

If I fix just these 5 things, everything in the book gets stronger, feels more urgent, and makes the reader more invested in the characters.

Yay! We just took a seemingly insurmountable problem (editing a whole-ass book) and condensed it to a really doable list- and this only took two mornings in a coffee shop. It’s a process that can be repeated with every book, and you can steal it when you edit a book, too.

But how do we keep ourselves moving forward at breakneck speed? I’ll cover that tomorrow.

See you then, you gorgeous creature.

-Madi

PS: If you’re an author, please say hi - let’s be friends! 👋

And if you know a fellow author who’d appreciate this, share this with them (and make them say hi haha, I want author friends!)