--- title: Editing & Revision description: Editing and revision involve refining draft manuscripts to improve clarity, structure, pacing, and mechanics. Learners will understand how to critically evaluate their own work, address plot holes, and polish prose for publication. category: literature-writing subcategory: creative-writing difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/editing-and-revision --- # Editing & Revision Editing and revision involve refining draft manuscripts to improve clarity, structure, pacing, and mechanics. Learners will understand how to critically evaluate their own work, address plot holes, and polish prose for publication. ## Available Resources 4 Books • 1 Courses • 3 Websites ## Websites ### 1. The Editor's Blog Fiction editor Beth Hill's archive of articles, written 2010–2020, on punctuation, dialogue formatting, point of view, scene structure, and manuscript self-editing, so novelists can spot and correct common craft and mechanical errors before submitting work. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://theeditorsblog.net/ **Tags:** fiction-editing, self-editing, punctuation, dialogue, novel-writing ### 2. Helping Writers Become Authors K.M. Weiland's long-running craft blog and podcast covering story structure, character arcs, outlining and scene construction. Readers get a consistent structural vocabulary of beats, arcs and act turns for diagnosing why a draft stalls and revising it. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/ **Tags:** story-structure, character-arc, creative-writing, outlining, revision ### 3. writersdigest.com WritersDigest.com is a comprehensive resource for writers, featuring craft articles, writing prompts, market guides, contests, and publishing tips to help aspiring and established authors improve their craft and get published. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://writersdigest.com **Tags:** websites, personal-development, communication ## Books ### 1. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace **Author:** Joseph M. Williams Williams diagnoses why prose reads as dense and supplies repeatable revision rules built on subjects-as-characters and verbs-as-actions. Readers can rewrite tangled sentences and paragraphs into clear ones instead of guessing from vague style advice. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226899152?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** prose-style, sentence-structure, revision, clarity, editing ### 2. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers **Author:** Renni Browne, Dave King Two professional editors show fiction writers how to revise their own manuscripts, with chapters on show versus tell, point of view, dialogue mechanics, interior monologue, and voice, plus before-and-after examples and checklists for applying each technique to a draft. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062720465?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** self-editing, fiction-writing, revision, dialogue, point-of-view ### 3. The Artful Edit **Author:** Susan Bell Editor Susan Bell's book on revising literary work, combining a close study of how Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins revised The Great Gatsby with practical methods for gaining distance from a draft and reworking structure, pacing, and prose. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393332179?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** revision, self-editing, literary-editing, fiction-writing, craft-of-writing ### 4. Revision and Self-Editing for Publication **Author:** James Scott Bell Novelist and writing teacher James Scott Bell's two-part guide: a self-editing section on characters, plot, structure, scenes, dialogue, and theme, followed by a step-by-step revision process with checklists for turning a finished first draft into a manuscript ready for submission. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1599637065?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** revision, self-editing, novel-writing, plot-structure, fiction-writing ## Courses ### 1. Creative Writing: The Craft of Story Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 4 weeks of study, 2-4 hours/week | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/craft-of-style **Tags:** courses, humanities-social-sciences, creative-writing --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/editing-and-revision