The First Edit: Finding & Fixing Developmental Issues in Your Novel

Originally published in the Central Colorado Writers Monthly Edition

You’ve done it. Through many long hours and concentrated effort, you’ve written an entire novel. After you celebrate that accomplishment, you realize this is only the beginning. Now comes Draft Two, but where to start?

The first revision of your novel needs to address the big-picture issues, what editors call “developmental” issues. These are the elements of your story that make it whole. For example, a developmental edit pays close attention to plot structure to ensure there’s a solid beginning, middle and end and nothing drops off in the middle. It also focuses on characterization to ensure your characters feel like real people who have hopes and dreams and struggles, and on whether or not your story has a satisfying ending to bring the dramatic question to resolution. 

If you can revise for these big-picture ideas on the first round, it will make the next rounds of editing more useful and efficient. You could look at more detailed, sentence-level issues or word-choice issues right away, but if you haven’t addressed the developmental issues, those line- and word-level edits could get completely eviscerated when you decide the chapter doesn’t serve your plot and you delete it altogether.

What are Developmental Issues?

Here is a general list of developmental issues that you can use as a checklist for your novel:

• Plot/Story Arc (beginning, rising action, climax, resolution; no plot holes)

• Setting (scenes happen in a place and time that is clear to the reader)

• Characterization (characters grow and change; characters have motivations for their actions)

• Point of View (POV; the story is told from the most advantageous POV; POV is consistent throughout the novel)

• Conflict (sufficient conflict between characters and in the plot to maintain tension)

• Genre (the story fits within the conventions for the intended genre)

How do I start?

It can be daunting to take on a developmental edit, but there are a couple of strategies you might use to tackle the task.

Read it once straight through

First, give the draft a full read without stopping. Ideally, do this in just a couple sittings. It will give you a good idea for how the story flows, where it drags, and what seems to be missing. It also means that smaller details from early in the story will be fresh in your mind at the end, like catching if you changed a character’s name half-way through.

While you make this first pass, don’t edit. 

It will be easier to avoid temptation if you read the draft on an e-reader or as printed pages.

Do jot down a few notes if something catches your attention. For example, you forgot to include a scene where the detective found an important clue, or it wasn’t clear how the lovers met before Chapter 2.

Revise for one developmental issue at a time 

Take on the biggest issues first. Were there whole scenes that dragged, or didn’t add to the rising action of the story? Take them out. Does your story need other scenes, more scenes, a different ending? An entirely new character? Do that now.

If one character needed reworking, read through the whole novel with an eye just for that character. Revise throughout with your focus only on them and their interactions with and impacts on other characters and the storyline. 

If the plot felt less exciting than you’d hoped, read through again and revise with a focus on adding more tension in the scenes. Create intentional cliff-hanger chapter and scene breaks. Add a mysterious character or plot twist.

Make yourself a new outline

If you identified a number of places where you needed to rework the plot, consider creating a new outline for yourself that incorporates these changes. That way you have the full story arc in front of you as you make your way through the novel for your revisions.

An outline like this can help you track plot small but important plot threads. If you see the story distilled to the key moments of each scene, you can quickly go through with your own red pen and fill in any missing elements.

Outlines can also help you meet your desired word count if you note how many words are in each chapter. Adding word count to your outline may reveal an extra-wordy chapter that could use paring down or a beginning that takes up too much real estate before hitting the rising action.

Revisit your genre

For genre fiction, there are common elements that make a romance a romance or a thriller a thriller. Revisit what the conventions are for your genre and ensure that your story meets enough of them to fit. If some are missing, now is the time to revise! 

Once you have resolved the big-picture developmental issues in your novel, you can be certain your beta readers and editors will be reading the story you intended to tell. There won’t be any sudden detours in plot or flat characters who read like they came off the back of a cereal box. This first developmental edit helps you ensure your plot captivates and compels your readers, your characters evoke empathy, and we’ll all be racing to reach the exciting, stakes-driven climax.