No, not editing the sequel, but what do you do after you’ve gone through and checked names and descriptions, looked at time sequence (“um, wasn’t there a week in there that’s gone missing? Oops!”) and caught the most obvious typoos?
It depends. If things seem to be flowing as you want them to, then you need to get outside eyes on the beast, and look for tics, grammar problems, and little things like “Who said that? I can’t tell, so the reader sure as [word] won’t!”
If things are not flowing, well … Time to start digging. Or if outside readers say, ‘Something’s hinky/goes thud/isn’t working,” and can’t pinpoint what it is. Time to tease apart the story and find the problem.
One of my bad habits is dropping plot threads, or not tying them up. If you suspect this might be what is going on, make a list of main plot, then sub-plots.
Plot: MC balances demands of new life with demands of duty as magical law enforcer.
Subplots: 1) life with toddler, 2) meet “aunt’s” relatives, 3) deal with possibly related magic things, 4) work with students, 5) and day jobs.
Of those subplots, two are continuations of a known story, and so can be threaded through the main plot as slices of life that don’t need a single major resolution (other than “will household survive Another Bad Diaper?!?”) Those threads can wave a little at the end of the book and it isn’t a major concern.
One of the sub-plots is contained in the book and needs to finish there. It will be used to further two other sub-plots, but has to resolve within the current work. Does it? Are you sure?
Numbers 3 and 4 are the sticky part. Three has to come to a satisfactory resolution in the book, even if it also continues into the larger plot arc. If it does not, either A) you’d better foreshadow that it might be a cliffhanger, or B) it at least needs to wrap up into a “solved for now but wonder about [detail].” Subplot 4 likewise, and in this case, it ties into 1. If one of those subplots remains dangling, then you need to find it, and fix it.
If outside readers, or you after a bit of time away, think that something’s “not working,” it might be time to dig out notecards and go through scene by scene, looking at what they do and how they move the plot and sub-plot. Think of Dwight Swain’s W pattern, and how it fits each chapter, then the overall novel.
You can also find pacing problems here. If outside readers complain that it feels frenetic and too pushed, you need more down time, breathing space for reader and characters both. Conversely, “too slow” might be trimming fun-but-unneeded scenes, or pushing the characters harder so that they earn that down time. Also, big thing here. Genre cues. Are you thinking thriller but pacing urban fantasy? Readers will complain that things are much too slow. You signal epic fantasy but pace thriller or urban fantasy? “Too fast, everything’s racing, it doesn’t make sense!” wail readers.
Ideally, you won’t have this level of work to do. Maybe one section or chapter goes “thud,” or doesn’t seem to fit the way it should. Get out the notecards or something similar and write out how it should fit and what it should do. This is where you might discover that it needs to come earlier, or later. You are not alone if this happens. Even detailed outliners can discover that something doesn’t work the way they had planned, and they need to rearrange a bit. You might discover that the MC can’t get certain information from a person, and instead needs to go to a place or a thing (or both. Archive visit? Newspaper morgue? County office?) You make the addition, adjust a little timing on either side of the detour, and everything clicks. Yeah!
As I said above, ideally you won’t need this level of analysis. However, if you are digging something out of a drawer, or old computer file, blowing off the dust, and trying to see where it went “kasproing!” and stopped working, a detailed analysis of the story can help you decide 1) is it fixable and 2) what broken things can be fixed, and how. (I might have to do this with the WIP, or I might not. First I have to finish the thing!)
“But my book can’t be saved!” Then cut out the best parts, write down the basic idea in your snippet and idea folder, and bid it adieu. Or offer it to someone who does that sort of story. Or tuck it away again, with your notes, and wait a while as you grow as a writer and editor, then revisit it when you are older, wiser, or both.
A very detailed guide to detailed revisions: https://writersinthestormblog.com/2025/02/a-complete-guide-to-revising-your-novel-part-two/
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Editing Part Two: The Sequel”
Going to bookmark this for if/when I decide to return to the w(n)ip. Too much general stuff going on right now that I need to tend to first. But definitely there in the backing the mind.
Good! And this level of teasing things apart can be too detailed for a lot of things, but it works for structure problems, at least for me.
“But my book can’t be saved!” Then cut out the best parts, write down the basic idea in your snippet and idea folder, and bid it adieu.
Wish I’d thought of that earlier. I had a short story I deleted because I didn’t like the ending. It was just ridiculous and unbelievable. Later, I knew a scene or two I really liked might have worked in another attempt. But, now gone, and I can’t remember how it went.
I started a snippets folder back when, for scenes I wrote that later did not fit but I still loved, and for scenes that I needed to write at the time but that would go into no known story. (I was also working through some … stuff … from my past, and wrote scenes that helped me, but would never, ever go into print.)
Tragic.
This goes down to the sentence level
A great rule for beginning writers is to write thick and revise lean. If you are in doubt whether this detail or that one is the right one — even if you know the story can bear only one in this place, put in them both. Then you can revise one out later instead of trying to remember the exact other detail which would have been perfect.
I said beginning because the more you write and the more you revise, the better you get, and it become easier to do them together.