During the social part of our Sunday morning writer meetup, where we all go around good-naturedly flexing on each other about our accomplishments and goals, one of our number proudly declared that he was almost done with the line-editing pass on his first novel, and he’s ready to start his second.

“The?!” as in “singular?!”

He’d spent the last several weeks going line by line through each chapter and proudly labeling them as “Gold,” so he knew they were done and ready to go.

To our credit, no one did an actual spit-take, but there were a few chuckles into coffee mugs, and a few knowing glances from those of us who have been there before. One writer wisely pointed out, “You realize Platinum exists?” I chimed in and informed him that, on that very morning, I was tweaking the end of The Halferne Perfidy and adding two chapters to it to change a character arc to be more thematically on point. This constitutes the second time I’ve done this since I told him the book was finished and let him read it six months ago.

Line editing is not a task. It’s not even a phase. It is a pathology. The sooner you accept that, the less likely you are to find yourself maniacally depressed when you’re saving a file called “Final Draft 7.0,” “Final Draft 9.1 – seriously last one,” or “Absolutely final-final-please-shoot-me draft – last one I promise 16.4.”

I get it. You finished your first draft. You are mighty. You are a crafter of stories. You are a tamer of sentences. The story more or less works, nobody spontaneously teleports between scenes, and only three characters are still named after drinking buddies or stolen from the spines of books on the shelf next to your desk. (Just me? Where do you people get spontaneous character names without derailing your flow?!) You think, “All that’s left is a little polish for grammar and spelling. A line edit. One pass.”

You’re so precious.

First of all, a line edit is not a polish. Odds are, you haven’t even sat down and read your book start to finish yet. You don’t actually know what you wrote. You only know what you planned to write. The first line edit is where you learn how many times your characters “smile,” how often you actually use passive voice, despite finally learning what it is, and that you’ve developed some sort of emotional attachment to the word “suddenly.”

The first pass is your reality check and damage control. It’s not tweaking. It’s seeing mold in the basement and water spots on the ceiling and realizing you’re probably going to end up calling a professional, but you’ll try to fix it yourself first.

You know that tightly knit story you think you crafted? Keep that “knit” metaphor going, because starting now, every little thread you pull is going to tug on everything else. Change one sentence to fix the rhythm, and now the next two feel off. Cut a paragraph for redundancy or accidental POV shift, and now the whole conversation moves too fast. Add a metaphor to show some style and color, realize you already had a metaphor in the next paragraph, and your scene now reads like a Shakespearean sonnet.

Line editing is like prose whack-a-mole You think you’re going in for:

Read → Fix → Done

What you end up with is more like:

Read, this won’t take long (Denial) → Fix → That broke something else (Annoyance) → Fix that → I’m brilliant → Wait, now the ending is wrong (Despair) → Rewrite the ending → Who wrote this garbage!? → Oh, it was me, wasn’t it (Acceptance) → Well, if we change the middle, this new ending pays it off (Bargaining) → Of course, it would be better if we set all this up in Act 1 (Unhinged Perfectionism) → Okay, I’ll get it in the next editing pass (Resignation)

When I edit, I know I should probably start at the beginning and go to the end, but we’ve already established I don’t work that way. My personal process (which works for me but is probably not endorsed by people who do this for a living) has at least five distinct passes that I perform multiple times, sometimes at a chapter level, sometimes at a character level.

1. The Beautification Pass

Why did this character smile 27 times? Am I stacking adverbs? Did I take a paragraph of technobabble to explain something that could be a one-sentence metaphor? Does anybody “run quickly,” or “kick something with their feet,” or otherwise waste words that aren’t needed because the verb already did the job?

2. The Technical Pass

Are all my sentences the same length and starting to read like bad slam poetry? Does my dialogue look like a ping-pong match of “…he said,” “…she said,” “…he said,” “…she said,” “…he said…” Are people standing up again after they already stood up in the previous paragraph? Where did that gun suddenly come from? I thought it got taken away two chapters back.

3. The Drama Pass

You can never have enough drama in a story. Can I take a line of dialogue and make it more tense? Can I add sensory details to show that a character is less comfortable than they appear at first glance? Is there any action or element I can add to this chapter to make it more intense without turning it into a telenovela?

4. The Character Pass

Is everybody behaving the way they should? Does the dialogue sound like their voice and not mine, or the loud-mouthed chick two seats over at the coffee shop who was yapping on the phone when I wrote this? Is anyone suddenly too wise, too calm, or too funny for who they actually are in this part of the story?

5. The Legitimacy Pass

Does everything in the chapter need to be there, and is it serving its purpose? Is the dialogue or action tying into the theme of the novel, or is this just a breather/character moment? If it is a breather, is it too long or too short for its purpose? Be honest: is this really just redundant, unimportant detail that the story would be better off without?

Yes, I know these are different than the ones I mentioned in the earlier post, and some of these are development edits, not line edits, but I invented this process and finished three books (a lie, obviously, I’m still editing) before I knew the difference. I should also edit one book, start to finish, but I rarely do. Usually, I take an hour or so and run one of the above passes (I don’t even have a set order, really) on a random chapter in a random project, or whatever is drawing me in at the time. Point is: you can’t edit for every time of issue at once, and I am the type of writer who just goes with what he’s in the mood to worry about at the time.

Yes, in my mind, this is also like cleaning exactly one tile on your kitchen floor. It inevitably leads to the “Ugh, I made a clean spot” syndrome. On the other hand, that compels me to spread out to neighboring chapters and edit them as well. Also, it keeps me from skipping “that section that’s probably already good enough” when I’ve gotten bored going start to finish.

The result is the same, though. Each pass reveals new flaws, and each set of fixes creates fresh little ripples that probably won’t be fully fixed in this editing pass. Editing is not a straight line. It’s a spiral.

I remember posting The Halferne Incubus on my website, thinking it was done. Then I got a list of typos from friends. Then a few of them talked to me about the story, and I realized I was too vague, and they misinterpreted the ending. There was consensus that a section was a bit draggy, so I rewrote it as a drama beat rather than an action beat. Then, just when I was starting to get proud of it, last summer, I found “a gentile breeze” in Chapter 1. %#@$*! How the hell?! I swear that typo has been sitting in plain sight since 2010.

So no, none of us is immune. It’s the way of things. Get used to it. The trick is to learn to love editing, or at least the improved book you get when you’re done. (Even if it’s just an emotional victory and a slightly less embarrassing PDF.) Will it ever be done? Honestly, I don’t feel like it will. There are points along the way where I’ll show a manuscript to a trusted friend. There are points where I will share it on the Internet for general comment. Someday, I’ll either publish or go hunting for an agent, but I haven’t reached that level of confidence yet.

For me, there’s always something I can tweak or add or clarify, and yes, there is some stuff I still want to gut and rewrite because I’ve got a decade of writing experience under my belt and I don’t write like that anymore. But, hey, if you think you’re one of those William Faulkner types who already has the novel perfect in their head before they start typing, I genuinely admire your naive optimism, and promise not to say, “Told ya so,” when you’re doing another pass in three months. That would be rude …

… but, there is a little dance I do behind your back at the meetups.