The first version is NEVER the final copy.
As you start your story for NaNoWriMo, remove the pressure from yourself that it must be perfect. Whatever your writing style is, whatever your story is about – the first draft is purely for recording your ideas.
After you have completed your first draft, walk away from it for a while. That’s right, walk away. You’ve been living with these characters and ideas for a long time now – as an AUTHOR. Now, you need to walk away and come back as a READER. Give it a month (if you can).
When you return, read the manuscript from beginning to end. By having a break from it, you will notice gaps and errors that you wouldn’t have seen the day after you wrote it.
Only now are you starting to have a manuscript. I highly recommend joining a writers’ group in your area and participating in their critique meetings. By having your work critiqued and critiquing the work of others, you will gain skills and ideas for your own story. As they say, two heads are better than one!
But this isn’t editing. The editing process starts when you have a manuscript that you think is ready for publishing. It won’t be ready, but you will think it is finished.
Authors never finish a manuscript; they just decide when to stop.
The first type of editing you need is a STRUCTURAL EDIT. Here, an editor will read through your story looking for the big picture elements – consistency in point of view, plot, and your writing style, permissions and copyright issues, pace and tense, characterisation and dialogue. The editor will not be looking at spelling mistakes yet because they may ask you to remove a paragraph, rewrite a scene or other large change that would make correcting a simple typo a waste of time.
After you have gone through the structural edit process (once, twice or many times) your manuscript will need a COPYEDIT. This is where the editor is looking for mechanical errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation.
PROOFREADING is the final stage of editing and is conducted after the typesetting. Here, the editor is looking for widows and orphans, alignment, margins, word breaks, spacing and other visual aesthetics that make the story easy for the reader’s eye.
So, what type of editing is your story ready for?