Editing 101: in-person workshop, meeting room at Woolwich Centre Library

A guide to editing, covering structural and line edits and the best process for editing a finished draft. This session will be run by Katie, who works as an editor, with time in the second half for everyone to share their own editing tips.
This is an in-person, one-off session.
Once you’ve finished a first draft, editing can feel very daunting, and it can be hard to know where to start and when to stop. In this session, I’ll take you through why editing is so vital, how editing works at a professional level within publishing houses, and how to apply these stages and processes to your own edits.
We will cover:

• Why editing matters
• How editing works within a publishing house
• Structural/development edits
• What structural edits are
• Things to think about once draft 1 is complete
• Step-by-step approach to structural editing
• Conflict, tension, pacing
• Beginnings and endings
• Plot arcs, reveals, climaxes, twists
• Second/third draft structural edits
• Line editing
• What line edits are
• Line editing process and things to think about
• Dialogue
• Characterisation
• Paragraph structure, sentence structure
• Word choice
• Narrative voice
• Sense, logistics and clarity
• Word count, tightening/expanding
• Polishing and what to look out for on final reads

In the second half of the workshop, we’ll invite everyone present to share their own tips and advice for editing, their own processes and ways of working. There will also be time for any questions or editing struggles people want to discuss.