Reddit reviews The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

I've been thinking about how to do that myself, and I've been digging around. I have two book recommendations:

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Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

This book talks about geniuses and experts and what sets them apart from regular Joes, from chessmasters, to golfers, to writers. Long story short, experts:

• Practice more than anyone else
  
• The quality of their practice is better (because they practice deliberately and seek perfection in the details)
  
• They get regular, expert feedback
  
• They study and build patterns of effective work (see below)
  
  It's an engrossing read, so I highly recommend this.
  
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  The Artful Edit: One the Practice of Editing Yourself
  
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  For a really long time, I was dependent on other people pointing out stuff that was wrong with my writing or waiting for an epiphany to get over a creative block. This book helped me identify what exactly I was missing in my writing, and the tools to describe what I was seeing or missing. I used what I learned in this book on a short story that won a local writing contest and made the top 15% of an international contest.
  
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  Reading these two books have helped me level up exponentially. I also wrote some blog posts about improvement and how I practice. You can PM me if you're interested.

i highly recommend The Artful Edit in addition to the beta readers. editing is about waaaaay more than the mechanics of grammar.

the last novel i wrote, i also compiled what screenwriters call a "beat sheet". take each section/chapter/whatever subdivisions you've used and just write down the main plot points for that section. do another pass for characters if you're having trouble keeping everybody in order. do another for thematic issues if need be, whatever you sense might be in trouble in the work. keeping it to the simplest moving parts helps you see where plot holes, or chronology errors, or etc are.

then you rewrite :-) and do the many many passes in The Artful Edit.

yes, it's a lot of work, but by the time you get all that down, your work is as error-free and as tight as you can make it. your agent will thank you. good luck!