Speaker 1: Get ready, because today I'm going to share with you an editing strategy that will make your life simple and save you time. By the way, my name is Brandon McNulty, I'm the author of Bad Parts, also the author of Entry Wounds, and welcome to my writing channel. Oftentimes when writers approach the editing process, they make a huge mistake. They start at the beginning of a chapter or the beginning of a story, and they edit line by line, word by word, trying to polish the story as they go along. The problem with this is that sometimes when you're going along, you realize that, hmm, well, I need to change that beginning, or I need to cut that beginning. And once you realize this, it's a soul crusher, because you poured so much effort into getting every sentence perfect, or every word perfect, in that intro scene, or in that intro paragraph, or whatever it was. Today I have a suggestion for you. It's a three-step strategy for editing your chapters, editing your stories. I think it's best if you keep it to a smaller, contained section of your story. The idea here is you have three steps, and I'm going to go through this. It's going to sound like it's a lot of work, but I promise you, it will save you time and it will make things simple. What you're going to do for this three-step method, you're going to take a chapter or take a short story, something that's small enough that you can edit in a single editing session. You're going to take a chapter, and the first thing you're going to do, you're going to read through it, and while you're reading through it, you're going to read through it quickly, and you're going to make necessary cuts along the way. You're only going to cut during this stage. Step one is the cutting stage. What this is going to do, it's going to help you familiarize yourself with this chapter that you've written. It may have been some time since you've written it, so it's good to familiarize yourself with what's going on in the chapter. You're going to read through it quickly, see how it flows, and then just get rid of things that you know don't belong there. Step two is to make revisions. Once again, you're going to read through your chapter, and as you're going along, you're going to stop and make necessary changes, big picture changes. You're not going to worry about finding the perfect sentence or getting the perfect word for the perfect sentence. Right now, you're only worried about making sure all the big picture elements of your chapter are in place. If there's a character conversation that's a little sloppy, this is the time to figure out, okay, how do I need this conversation to progress? If there's a situation where a character walks into a building for a first time, and you need to get the setting description down, find out the key ingredients for that setting description. If you have an action scene where characters are fighting, figure out where these characters need to be positioned. You're not going to focus on making everything perfect here. You're just going to make sure that all the big picture elements are working, they're clicking, they make sense. And then step three is the polishing phase. This is where you start at the very beginning. You read through your story, your chapter one more time, and you focus on line editing. You focus on finding the right word for the right sentence. You focus on making sure everything flows nicely, that there's no errors, that the pacing is clicking. Now is the time to focus on small scale things, because you already cut the things you don't need, and you made revisions to your big picture story elements. I know it sounds like a lot of work having to read through a chapter three times, but trust me, if you go through this method, you cut things quickly, then you make your necessary revisions, and then you finally end things up by polishing off every single sentence, you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run, and you'll save yourself a lot of stress. Question of the day, have you ever spent hours polishing something that had to be cut or revised later on? Let us know in the comments section below. Thank you guys for watching. If you want to support the channel, please pick up a copy of either one of my books. Bad Parts is great if you like small town horror, it's about people trading away their sick and injured body parts in order to get healthy again. And then Entry Wounds is great if you like thrillers, it's about a guy who picks up a haunted gun, and he can't put it down until he kills six people with it. Also be sure to check out my other videos, hit the like and subscribe buttons for me, share this video with a friend, and as always, remember to keep on writing.