Tips in keeping consistency in editing.

FlutterOfCrows said:

The reason why you draw a tomato is for long-term gratification

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does it have to be a tomato?
I mean, just for the sake of argument...
he might like, say, a boob or a butt-cheek, who knows what boats his float.

I just can't see being like...
"oh, I can't wait to get the next 45 minute session in the bag.
I get to draw another vegetable."

TinaMigarlo said:

does it have to be a tomato?
I mean, just for the sake of argument...
he might like, say, a boob or a butt-cheek, who knows what boats his float.

I just can't see being like...
"oh, I can't wait to get the next 45 minute session in the bag.
I get to draw another vegetable."

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This is the first time I have had someone state this Thanks for the chuckle.

TheKillingAlice said:

but there's always scenes I completely forgot exist and they catch me off guard. Like, I know I wrote them and why, but I didn't remember until I read them

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I know this feeling. And yes, waiting until its "enjoyable" to read your work again? You definitely see more errors, see the punctuation and phrasing different.

the one I like, is when the "kicked in the guts" emotional part comes up. I'm still prone to feel that lurch in my guts reading it, I'm still in danger of getting a wet eye or a sniffle. And I sit there, wondering. I wrote this. I know this is in here, and I must have read it lord only knows how many times already, all told.

but, with everything else that may or may not be done right in that book... I wonder how strong the gut-kick or sniffles are for first time readers when they hit the same scene.

but ANYTIME you take a break from writing? You should be at least reading if not editing, something older

TinaMigarlo said:

I know this feeling. And yes, waiting until its "enjoyable" to read your work again? You definitely see more errors, see the punctuation and phrasing different.

the one I like, is when the "kicked in the guts" emotional part comes up. I'm still prone to feel that lurch in my guts reading it, I'm still in danger of getting a wet eye or a sniffle. And I sit there, wondering. I wrote this. I know this is in here, and I must have read it lord only knows how many times already, all told.

but, with everything else that may or may not be done right in that book... I wonder how strong the gut-kick or sniffles are for first time readers when they hit the same scene.

but ANYTIME you take a break from writing? You should be at least reading if not editing, something older

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Well, especially with emotional scenes, I often wonder if they hit at all. Like, is something I intended as an emotional scene, actually an emotional scene? The translation of what you have in mind to what you can portray is always tricky and you, as the author, have the scene in mind, so it's never truly something you read completely like someone new to the story. It's among the hardest things in writig, in my opinion.

TheKillingAlice said:

Well, especially with emotional scenes... It's among the hardest things in writig, in my opinion.

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yeah, definitely. that lurch in the guts, that sniffle. That came for the first time late in the writing game, believe me. When i felt that, and kept feeling it even knowing it was coming, I was like... this has to be doing the right thing. But, I'm getting close to finding out. I have a beta reader chewing through something big, and when they run into *that*, as a virgin reader with no spoiler? I'm waiting on what report i get. After all this time, if i can get that as a payoff, I'll feel like I accomplished something.

like I always say. I know I'm a failed writer. But its a matter of being a complete failure, or just a partial failure.
you gotta have reasonable dreams, lol

Oh wow, a million words? I usually edit in ~80,000-120,000 word chunks and that's already hell as it is. Between correcting mistakes, clarifying sentences, and realigning characters or scenes, I can't imagine doing that much in one go. You'd almost be better off just not bothering to edit it, not unless you're planning to make it more official by either getting it published or something. On the other hand, if you focus instead on making it a learning experience, it might be worth it. Focus less on just fixing mistakes and instead seeing how the story feels or works out and making corrections as you go.

Either way, I wish you luck.

Wow you're a Flip?
I'm not a writer, but I want to suggest you editing with Red Horse as your editing buddy. It works for me when drawing, a pack of Sampoerna Splash and Bintang always work like a charm.

EdwinLovato said:

Wow you're a Flip?

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No. Hindi ako Pilipino, isa akong half-German, half-shepherd.

EdwinLovato said:

I'm not a writer, but I want to suggest you editing with Red Horse as your editing buddy. It works for me when drawing, a pack of Sampoerna Splash and Bintang always work like a charm.

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I'm no Edgar Allan Poe (who gets drunk to write), and I didn't vote for Fernando Poe Jr. when he ran for president. But the Pulang Kabayo is good.

I'm just looking for ways to keep myself on editing. But, as it turned out like the others say, I need to chill the fk out and just edit in my pace.

JordanIda said:

In the Web Novel world? Maybe. In this alter-reality, books never seem to end, and people try to pump out a chapter every fiew days, to keep the Patreon dripfeed running.

I'm talking about stories that begin, develop, and end.

Let's say you've spent a month outlining a novel. Then you spend four months developing the outline to a draft of 350,000 to 400,000 words. (A big novel, but one that ends.) I'm saying, a good rule of thumb is to plan on another four months for editing and producing a final draft.

In my travels over most of the Web Novel scene (FF, AO3, RR, W@ttp@d, InK@tt, Webn@vel, SH, and others of more dubious repute than all of the above), I've met few authors who finish books before posting them. Especially in the fan fiction domain, which is dubious and scurrilous categorically and the only reason I've made this benighted journey. So I freely admit that I might be alone in this position.

Just forget everything I've said and hit the easy button. Grammarly's your friend.

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No, I don't want to write endless slops. My goal is to write a finite slop, trying to do justice to the oversaturated isekai-genre, but ended up joining it.

But I'm no Darth Vader.

FleecedSheep said:

Oh wow, a million words? I usually edit in ~80,000-120,000 word chunks and that's already hell as it is. Between correcting mistakes, clarifying sentences, and realigning characters or scenes, I can't imagine doing that much in one go. You'd almost be better off just not bothering to edit it, not unless you're planning to make it more official by either getting it published or something. On the other hand, if you focus instead on making it a learning experience, it might be worth it. Focus less on just fixing mistakes and instead seeing how the story feels or works out and making corrections as you go.

Either way, I wish you luck.

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Well, fk me (pardon the language). I guess I really made a mistake of editing 'on the go'. Based on what you amd the others said, I really didn't made proper edits.

Also yeah, I really did intend to reach a million words or more on that one, and it's a long-ass story with 5 arcs and 21 books that I wrote in the span of six years.

Hans.Trondheim said:

No. Hindi ako Pilipino, isa akong half-German, half-shepherd.

I'm no Edgar Allan Poe (who gets drunk to write), and I didn't vote for Fernando Poe Jr. when he ran for president. But the Pulang Kabayo is good.

I'm just looking for ways to keep myself on editing. But, as it turned out like the others say, I need to chill the fk out and just edit in my pace.

No, I don't want to write endless slops. My goal is to write a finite slop, trying to do justice to the oversaturated isekai-genre, but ended up joining it.

But I'm no Darth Vader.

Well, fk me (pardon the language). I guess I really made a mistake of editing 'on the go'. Based on what you amd the others said, I really didn't made proper edits.

Also yeah, I really did intend to reach a million words or more on that one, and it's a long-ass story with 5 arcs and 21 books that I wrote in the span of six years.

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Well, everyone has their own process. That you did that much is still impressive, when most stories barely do even a fraction of that. Just, uh, yeah. I stand by what I said earlier. I do think it's more important to write and get it out rather than to stall out, so don't beat yourself up over it.

Hans.Trondheim said:

I'm sure you guys faced a similar situation; having finished, or written a lot of chapters for, your novel, and then realized, "Hell, I want to edit this stuff I wrote." See, I'm in that situation right now. The Philippine Department of Education has just entered its "30-day uninterrupted, forced, mandatory, backed-up by law, vacation for all its teachers," so I got tons of time in my hands for the duration of this month (April). I'd like to edit my old work, The Saint Series (The Human Saint is Bored, The Beastman Saint is H*rny, The Demon Saint is Missing, The Elf Saint is a NEET, and The Dwarf Saint is Sleeping). Problem is, at 1.3 million words and 400+ chapters, it's tedious to check for every mistake and 'off' parts of the story.

Well, I know what to expect and how to do things. My only problem is to keep consistency, since--as I said, editing a million-word work is tedious and difficult. So, again, I need suggestions on HOW TO KEEP EDITING, not how to edit. Any suggestion is welcome, including ways to make this part faster and easier. You can also tell me straight to just "Stop writing, you wannabe author hack," explain why, and depending on the points you threw, I might really drop writing altogether (I'm serious on this part coz I've been wondering lately if I'm just wasting my time)!

For short, any help is appreciated.

P.S.: Can't hire an editor since it's expensive in a third-world shithole like the Philippines, and a Filipino teacher's salary can barely keep a single teacher alive. Same goes with AI apps, and Scrivener-like programs.

Here's my sexy and spicy illustration, courtesy of @pangmida as advanced thanks!
View attachment 48122

Edit: Guys, I need advice, not "haha" reactions.

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Honestly, it's unrealistic to edit >1m words in 1 month, dude. For comparison, I spent 1 month just to edit 20 chapters (~50k words).

Editing is a tiring job, even harder than writing a new chapter. Writers need to dissect their manuscripts, analyze narrative structures, find narrative errors, design narrative solutions and implement them to provide a better reading experience.

Personally, I divide editing into 3 categories including: (1) language editing including grammar, style, and prose; (2) storytelling editing including POV, immersion, hook, foreshadowing, visualization, etc; (3) story content editing including characters, worldbuilding, plot, and conflict.

For 1 month, I only focused on editing the storytelling and story content. I skipped the language editing for the final stage of editing.

My suggestion, you might consider prioritizing editing the most problematic chapters. You can focus on editing the storytelling and story content. For language editing, you can postpone it to the end or you can also use tools like Grammarly for efficiency.

I wish you the best.

Regards.

Eldoria said:

Honestly, it's unrealistic to edit >1m words in 1 month, dude. For comparison, I spent 1 month just to edit 20 chapters (~50k words).

Editing is a tiring job, even harder than writing a new chapter. Writers need to dissect their manuscripts, analyze narrative structures, find narrative errors, design narrative solutions and implement them to provide a better reading experience.

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Yeah, tis really difficult and I'm susceptible to burn out.

Eldoria said:

Personally, I divide editing into 3 categories including: (1) language editing including grammar, style, and prose; (2) storytelling editing including POV, immersion, hook, foreshadowing, visualization, etc; (3) story content editing including characters, worldbuilding, plot, and conflict.

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Like @TheKillingAlice said, I think taking a while to edit will benefit me by clearing my mind and lead me to make better calls for editing my work.

Eldoria said:

For 1 month, I only focused on editing the storytelling and story content. I skipped the language editing for the final stage of editing.

My suggestion, you might consider prioritizing editing the most problematic chapters. You can focus on editing the storytelling and story content. For language editing, you can postpone it to the end or you can also use tools like Grammarly for efficiency.

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This is the hard part. With 400+ chapters and 21 volumes, I don't know which one is problematic unless I read it in chronological order. As for Grammarly and similarly related apps, these are helpful, but not much since it tends to clean out the character in my writing. And with freemium, it's limited.

I dunno what you should do, but it takes me 1-2 days to write a new chapter, and 2-3 weeks to edit it. I go through multiple revisions before and after feeding it to scribophile.

Whenever I feel discouraged, I feed it to AI so it can tell me how amazing it is.

Grace_5 said:

Would you be open to an editor?

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The burnout pattern makes sense. At 1.3M words across five novels, you're not editing — you're trying to hold a living world in working memory while also fixing prose. Those are two separate cognitive tasks and doing them simultaneously is exhausting.

One reframe that might help: separate "does the world make sense internally" from "does the prose represent the world well." The first is a consistency pass. The second is a quality pass. Most editing advice conflates them, but at your scale they need to be different operations.

For the consistency pass, I'd go entity-by-entity rather than chapter-by-chapter. Pick one character — Saint Matreiya or whoever has the most appearances. Trace every scene they appear in, every change to their status, every item they gain or lose. You're not reading for quality, you're auditing a ledger. Then move to the next character. This is faster than reading linearly and you catch things chapter-by-chapter misses (a sword that vanishes in novel 2 but reappears in novel 4, an NPC whose name shifts spelling after chapter 150).

The quality pass — prose rhythm, word choice, showing vs telling — can happen separately on whatever schedule Ellie and TinaMigarlo recommend. But getting the internal consistency sorted first means you're not second-guessing the world while you're trying to improve sentences.

Also: once you find a real consistency error (and you will), write it down somewhere permanent before you fix it. A log of "what I changed and why" is invaluable if you're publishing serially and readers remember things you've already forgotten.

Good luck with the edit. 1.3M finished words is no small thing.