How to Write Non-Fiction: Self-editing your manuscript
“Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.”
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well
You have finished the first draft when you can print it out and read it end to end without obvious missing sections or encountering notes to yourself like [insert chapter here] or [research this]. At this point, you have the raw material you can now shape into your finished book.
I don’t recommend you share this draft with anyone. Wait until you have at least done a first self-edit, as you will find it much improves your work in progress.
Some people find editing daunting, but I love this part of the process! My self-edit is where I wrangle the chaos of my first draft into something worth reading. I hope you find it just as rewarding.
Shift your mindset from writer to editor, from author to reader
In the initial phase of exploring ideas and writing, it’s all about you, the author.
You turn the ideas in your head into words that you understand and anecdotes that make sense to you. In that first rush of creativity, you can banish your critical voice and ignore any nagging doubts about the material.
But now you need to switch heads.
That’s how I prefer to think about it, but you might consider it as changing hats or changing jobs. Whatever helps you move from the creative, anything goes, first-draft writer, to the more critical editor who shapes the book for the reader’s experience.
Writing is telepathy. It connects minds across time and space.
You are reading these words and the meaning flows from my brain into your brain — but only if I craft the book well enough.
The same is true of your manuscript.
Yes, of course, you want to double down on your creative choices and make sure you achieve everything you want to with your manuscript. But you also need to keep the reader in mind as you edit because the book is ultimately for them.
• Does the book make sense? Does it lead the reader through a journey and leave them ready to take action or transform their own life?
• What might improve their experience?
• How can you make sure they are not bored or confused?
• What will make them read on and, at the end, close the book and leave a review, recommend it to their friends, join your email list, buy your course or consulting, and pre-order your next book?
Are you detached enough to edit effectively?
This can be a particular challenge with memoir, or with emotionally resonant narrative non-fiction, because everything you’ve written is precious and personal. The first draft may even have been therapy, but now you need to leave that behind or you’ll find it impossible to edit.
If you’re still emotionally connected to your words, put the manuscript away and come back to it when you have some distance — and that might take longer than you think.
The first draft of my memoir, Pilgrimage, was over 100,000 words by the time I returned from the Camino de Santiago, my third pilgrimage in almost three years. I had tried to shape the book before then, but it never felt quite right, so I kept putting off the edits.
It was only after I finished the Camino and had some distance from it that I realised I had completed my character arc. I was on the other side of the experience. I could finally see what the finished book would be, and I edited to fit that vision.
I removed tens of thousands of words to distil the manuscript down to its essence, and I reshaped the chapters around specific themes. This pruning and reshaping process was incredibly difficult, and it took several editing passes before I honed the manuscript down to a slim 35,000-word draft.
I’ve never had to do this much editing with my usual non-fiction self-help books. I usually write lean and expand rather than cut. But this kind of memoir writing was different, and what served me as I journaled each day while I walked differed from what served the reader as they read the book. But I could only see that once I had some distance.
Does the manuscript take the reader on a coherent journey from beginning to end?
The structure of your book is critical to ensure the reader remains on a clear path from beginning to end. This sounds easy, but how a book flows in your mind may not make sense to the person who eventually reads the book.
If the reader is confused, you won’t be there to explain what you meant, so it’s your job to make sure the book is as clear as possible.
• Does the chapter order take the reader logically through a journey of discovery and transformation?
• What would make it stronger?
• Are you using jargon without explaining it?
• Can you use sub-headings to make sections clearer?
• Do you give readers an overview of the structure in your introduction?
• Do you remind them what they’ve learned in your conclusion and draw relevant connections between different sections of the book?
• Can you involve the reader by asking more questions?
Can you reduce word count?
One of the most common complaints about non-fiction books is that they feel over-padded, that the author could have achieved their goal with fewer words.
But it’s not so much about word count.
It’s more about the value to the reader.
Remove any repetitious passages or anecdotes that make the same point. Sometimes you might find you need them, but weigh up what’s really important about that section.
In Pilgrimage, I wanted to have a chapter about the pilgrim’s day. I had so many notes on all the different days I walked, so the first draft of that chapter was extremely long.
During my self-edit, I removed most of it, leaving a slim chapter that gave the reader a sense of a typical pilgrim’s day, rather than all the repetition that is an inherent part of a multi-day walk.
Make it more personal
If you’re writing memoir, this won’t be a problem, but with other types of non-fiction, your chapters may be too packed with information or research. The book might also lack personal experience and your author voice. Add in more at this stage. You can also use quotes to bring in different voices.
I use excerpts from my journals, as well as appropriate quotes. In The Healthy Writer, we used quotes from a reader survey, bringing multiple new voices to the text.
As you edit, you might read over some sections and feel that they don’t sound like you. If this happens, you may have inadvertently copied something from somewhere else, so make sure you rephrase any sections that don’t sound like you in order to avoid plagiarism, as discussed in chapter 2.13 on legalities.
Check your facts, quotes, and citations — add references or bonus material
During your edit, it’s a good idea to recheck any of the material you’ve specifically quoted. Have you kept a list of your references and included them in chapter notes or appendices?
You can also hire a fact checker, but if you did the original research, it’s easy enough to make sure it’s all referenced as you proceed. It will be a lot more work if you leave it to the last minute and have to scour through everything to find where you quoted from.
You can also consider extra material at this stage.
• How can you make the book even more useful?
• Can you make downloadable extras or checklists?
• Could you record extra audio or videos that will help the reader even more?
Use editing software
Once I’ve finished my edits, I use ProWritingAid to check the manuscript, or you could also use Grammarly or other editing software.
These tools help you find issues like passive voice, repeated words, incorrect comma usage, typos, or bad sentence structure, and they can check for inadvertent plagiarism, too.
We all have patterns and mistakes in our writing that are hard for us to spot alone, and software can augment the editing process. If you make your manuscript the best it can be before sending to a human editor or proofreader, they can focus on other issues that software cannot address, like the reader’s flow through the manuscript.
I learn something every time I go through an edit like this. I don’t make all the suggested changes, but it certainly helps improve my writing. You can even create your own custom style guide.
You can find ProWritingAid at:
www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid
You can find my tutorial on how to use ProWritingAid at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaidtutorial
Read the book out loud or use a text-to-speech reader to do it for you
Some authors read their book aloud end-to-end, which is a helpful step once you’ve been through any major rewrites.
There are also plenty of text-to-speech tools that can help — for example, NaturalReader, Speechify, or ElevenLabs Reader app. MS Word includes a Read Aloud tool in the Review tab.
Listening to your book will also help you edit for audio as you’ll hear issues you can’t see on the page.
My self-editing process
While I write in Scrivener and do minor edits on screen, I find printing out my first draft the most effective way of self-editing.
Before printing, I go through the manuscript with ProWritingAid and fix up anything that particularly stands out. Then I print it out with two pages to an A4 page in landscape mode so it resembles a book. I will often ‘rest’ the manuscript at this point, leaving it in a folder until I feel less emotionally connected to it and can tackle the text with a fresh mind. This usually takes a week or so.
I schedule blocks of time for editing, and I will often work in a local cafe with my noise-cancelling headphones on. I try to edit fifteen to twenty-five pages per session. I use an old-school black Biro pen to scribble notes, draw arrows to move things around, change words, delete lines, and write notes about what needs to be added.
Some pages end up as a mass of black marks; others are relatively clean. But no page remains untouched.
You can see some hand-edited pages from this book at:
www.TheCreativePenn.com/hand-edits
If you prefer to edit on a computer screen or tablet, I suggest at least changing the font, so there is some difference to when you were writing the first draft. It’s always difficult to see our own errors, so making it look unfamiliar can really help.
My first round of editing is more about structure, missing sections, and bigger content issues than it is about grammar and sentence structure, although of course, you might pick those up, too.
I’m a discovery writer, which means I often don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it. I also write the first draft out of order, so when I read the manuscript front to back, I often have to reshuffle chapters. This is just part of my process, and yours will likely be different.
During self-editing, you will find lots of things you want to change, especially if you rested the manuscript for a few weeks to give yourself distance. You might need to rewrite chapters, add new sections, find additional research to back up your thoughts, or try to find a quote that highlights a chapter.
Revision of this kind is completely normal, and your first edit is likely to be the major one, as you hack the text into something closer to your desired book.
Once I’ve finished my hand-written changes, I go back and update my Scrivener project.
If the changes are significant the second time around, I’ll print specific chapters or even the whole manuscript again and do another pass of hand-edits.
How long will the self-editing process take?
This will depend on the type of writer you are and how complete your first draft is. If you structure and plan the book in great detail and spend time up front making the first draft the best it can be, then editing might take less time than for a discovery writer who only figures out the book after the first draft.
The more books you’ve written, the more you understand how to shape a book, the more you can write a clean draft, so editing speeds up. That doesn’t mean it gets easier to write a book, but it does mean you know how to find and fix issues.
It will also depend on the length.
A 30,000-word self-help book targeted at a specific audience will be a faster edit than a 80,000-word biography with lots of historical references.
It will also depend on your experience, so don’t compare your editing time to someone who’s already written a lot of books.
Give self-editing the time it needs. You want your book to be the best it can be.
But also consider Parkinson’s Law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This law also applies to editing.
When is your self-edit finished?
You will be utterly sick of your manuscript by the end of the self-editing process. Don’t worry, this is normal!
You’ve likely read your words so many times that you can’t see them clearly anymore. You are so over the whole thing that you want to forget the book altogether — and if you don’t feel this way, you probably haven’t self-edited enough!
On the other end of the scale, if you’re self-editing too much, remember that nothing is ever perfect. You can edit the same material forever if you keep obsessing over changes or adding more and more to it. Set a deadline and hold yourself to it.
When you really feel you can’t do any more, it’s time to work with a professional editor.
Questions:
• How can you shift your mindset from author to reader?
• Do you have enough emotional distance to edit effectively? Do you need to rest the manuscript for longer?
• Is the reader’s journey through the book as clear as possible? Does the chapter flow take the reader logically through a journey of discovery and transformation?
• Can you cut down the text? Can you use sub-headings to make sections clearer? Can you involve the reader by asking more questions?
• Can you make the book more personal by telling your story and bringing in your experience?
• Have you checked your facts and cited sources? Have you listed references and a bibliography?
• Do you need to create any bonus material?
• Have you checked the draft using editing software or reading aloud?
• Have you done everything you can to improve the manuscript? Are you ready to work with a professional editor or proofreader?
Resources:
• ProWritingAid editing software — www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid
• Grammarly editing software — www.Grammarly.com
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction — William Zinsser
• Hand-edited pages from an early draft of this book — www.TheCreativePenn.com/hand-edits
