: Re: What are the stages to self editing? I just finished writing my first draft of my novel, and I don't quite know the states of self-editing. Right now, I'm not looking for advice on professional

@Gonzalez219

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Whatever gets you to a final state that you like. You're not handing in drafts in English class.
Some steps that various writers have found useful:

Put it aside for a month to let it cool. This helps you read with more objectivity.
Work from the big picture to the small details. It does you no good to carefully polish every sentence in a scene if the truth is that the scene is superfluous and should go, and no good to ponder whether a scene is superfluous when the beginning and the end belong to different genres and so the entire section with the scene will have to be jettisoned.
Consult beta readers at some point. There is a trade-off here -- on one hand, you will never get a second chance to get a first impression from the readers, and you might waste them on problems you could fix yourself, and on the other, you don't want to get useful feedback after you are so sick of your story that you can't bear to revise it one more time.

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