The Art of Self-Editing: Editing Your First Draft with Geraldine Walsh

Course Summary:

This course navigates both fiction and non-fiction, covering the various stages of the editing process. It will give participants the tools and guidance to spot what kind of edits are needed and how to grow their editing eye. It will ensure that the next time participants look at their manuscript, they will feel confident in their editing skills and goals.

Participants will be given suggested reading material and exercises in class to develop their editing eye. While this course does not include analysing or editing participants writing during sessions, it is suggested that course participants have a first draft project in mind to utilise the guidance offered throughout the six weeks.

Course Outline:

Week 1 – Understanding Your Editing Goals
Editing can be overwhelming and complicated. Chances are, even if you’re on your first, second, or third draft, your manuscript will still require work. But it can also be one of the most empowering aspects of being a writer. In our first week, we will look at the purpose of editing, talk about your own personal editing goals, and discuss how to avoid the overwhelming feelings editing can bring on.

Week 2 – Training Your Brain
As authors, we can get very close to our manuscript that we are unable to spot the problems. In our second week, we will work on gaining distance from your work and shifting into an editor’s perspective to rework a second draft with appropriate skills. We will look at how to move into different editing roles and not being afraid to challenge your writing.

Week 3 – The Story Edit
In week three, we will look at what a Story Edit means aka, The Developmental Edit. This week, participants will uncover tips on how to examine the draft for troublesome writing habits on a large scale which permit fatal errors in structure. This includes examining the strengths and weaknesses of the draft relevant to engaging the target audience with a focus on story, theme, and voice to ensure a balance in the narrative.

Week 4 – The Line Edit
In week four, we look at the part of the editing process that seeks to make the writing consistent, smooth, and compelling so the reader moves effortlessly through the story or narrative. We will look at how to analyse creative content, writing style, and language at the sentence and paragraph level of the manuscript. The purpose is not to search the manuscript for errors but to focus on how the author uses language and words to communicate their ideas, searching for tone, writing style, atmosphere, and emotion.

Week 5 – The Copy Edit
In week five, we get technical. We learn about The Copy Edit, which is the process of editing that addresses flaws on a very technical level. This editing stage is designed to correct the mechanics of your writing. This week helps writers understand how and why to work through a copy edit.

Week 6 – Grow Your Editing Eye
In our final week, we will look at the editing concerns of all participants while focusing on and creating an editor’s mindset. We will look at how to build a list of editing issues, choose what to edit, applying edits, avoiding the editing treadmill with infinite rewrites, and knowing when you are done.

Course Outcomes:

By the end of the course, participants will understand the different stages of editing, how to train their editing eye to avoid the overwhelm of the edit, grow their own style of editing, spot problems before they occur, and finally, edit their first draft with clear ideas on how to strengthen the foundations of their story or narrative while also understanding their writing from a sentence structure perspective. The key element of this course is to give writers the confidence to make changes to a manuscript they are very close to and perhaps reluctant to change.

GERALDINE WALSH is an award-winning writer, journalist, author, and editor. She is a frequent contributor to The Irish Times and Irish Examiner on a range of topics in the women’s health, mental well-being, and parenting spaces. Her debut book, Unraveling Motherhood (Hatherleigh Press, 2023), is part memoir and considers motherhood a tightly woven knot of physical, mental, emotional, and social changes and then seeks to unravel that knot. Geraldine’s fiction has appeared in Frazzled Lit, The Storms, Aimsir, Agenda and more. Her novel extract was placed in the Top 100 of the Bridport Novel Prize 2024, and she was shortlisted in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2024.