Steps to self-publishing, Part 3: Prepping your book

Posted on January 26, 2017 by D Standard 1

So, you’ve written your thing and decided to put it out there yourself, indie-style. You’ve picked the best platform(s) for your work and now you have to make sure your book is fully ready to be uploaded and released into the wild.

Step one, which we’ve discussed before, is professional editing. Get your pages to an editor you trust. Most of the better ones offer different levels of editing, e.g. proofreading (checking for typos) vs. big picture editing (where they look at things like consistency of character, plot mechanics etc). Choose your service (be honest with yourself about what your work may need), send it out, and receive their notes with an open mind. Getting a new set of eyes on your story is invaluable. Doesn’t mean you have to make every single change; with any notes, you have to be able to translate them into what’s relevant for your work. Sometimes the specific note/suggestion wouldn’t work, but whatever’s underlying the note is something you need to look at (e.g. you may hear a certain character needs more page time, which might destabilize your plot… the underlying issue might be that when that character does appear, it’s not in an impactful way, so you’ll actually need to make their few scenes hit harder, mean more emotionally, that kind of thing).

Once you’ve made your changes, your book really is at its final draft. That’s exciting!

Now you’ll need step two: cover design. If you’re handy with Photoshop, you can take a shot at this yourself, using each platform’s size/design guidelines. Or, you can use a professional designer. The goal is to create a cover that looks professional, slick, and impactful in color, black and white, and at thumbnail size (since that’s how most people will first view it). So, you decide. If you have the chops, that’s awesome. We’ve done both, and often use ebook launch, since they produce awesome work like—#shamelessplug—our covers below.

Step three is formatting. Each platform will require your book to be formatted a specific way. While this is something you can do yourself—and if you want to, please have at it!—there are many places that will do that for you. We use 52 Novels, since they’re quick, reliable, cost effective, and very easy to work with, but there are many other options available too (e.g. Bookbaby, Lulu, etc.). They’ll prepare your manuscript so that when you upload it to the publishing platform, it’ll be accepted first time and published forthwith. Which is nice. They’ll usually ask for the cover as well as the manuscript, since some of your files will need the cover to be included “inside” the file, attached to the manuscript.

Once you get your files back from the formatter, you really are ready.

Are you though? Are you ready? Because once you upload your files, write your book’s blurb for the site, add all the tags so that people can search for it, include your financial info so they can, you know, actually pay you… then the only thing left for you to do is hit the button that says PUBLISH.

Eek!

Go on. Do it. It’ll feel great.

We’ll let you coast on that beautiful feeling of having the book you wrote out there for people to read for a while… but soon, we’ll cover what comes next (spoiler: marketing!).

So go enjoy being published! You did great!

Editing: Beta Readers

Posted on November 10, 2016 by D Standard 1

Finally, the words you’ve been waiting for: Your draft is done!

dragon-landing

You finally get to take a break. So power down your computer and relax… while you hand your manuscript over to… someone else.

Okay, so maybe relax is the wrong word. CRINGE might be more accurate. PANIC, definitely. SKIN-CRAWLING FEAR, possibly.

We’ve said before that writing can be an isolating experience. It’s just you, your computer, the wild and crazy thoughts in your head, and that beautiful bowl of peanut M&Ms (replace with the snack of your choice). It’s no wonder that bringing someone else into the mix feels so disconcerting. You might feel that what you wrote was awesome, just the way it is.

bridget-jones-darcy-gif

But once your draft is polished, the next step is sending it out into a little corner of the world for feedback. It’s gotta go.

But what that corner looks like is totally up to you. Do you have a group of trusted friends that you could ask to give your work a read through? Are you a part of, or could you join, a local writing group? Are you lucky enough to have a mentor?

We all need a Yoda to give our work the Jedi side-eye

It’s important that you can trust whomever you ask to give honest feedback. If your mom is the type to praise your achievement at finally completing something and will focus on the quality of the paper your story is printed on, she’s not the right person to ask. Nor do you want to give your work to a friend who prides themselves on getting through school without ever opening a book.

You need a reader who, you know, reads. And can be critical.

If you don’t have anyone that fits that description, don’t worry, there are loads of professional editors out there that will be willing to go over your manuscript… for a fee. Finding that editor is kind of like online dating. You need to check their profile and their background, make sure they’re legit, see what they’re into, and then ask if they would be interested. Hiring an editor who works mainly on historical YA fiction may not be a good fit for your sci-fi opus. There are a lot of groups online that have several editors “on staff” and once you describe your work, and what kind of feedback you’re looking for, will hook you up better than match.com.

Once your manuscript is in someone else’s hands, do your best to distract yourself. Rewatch of Gilmore Girls anyone? Whenever that annoying box pops up to confirm that you are still watching, take a moment and start to mentally prepare yourself for when your beta reader gets back to you. Because it’s gonna hurt. It doesn’t matter if only one tiny error is found, it’s still going to sting. Spoiler: There’s going to be more than one.

gilmore-girls-lorelei

But remind yourself that the good news is, you can fix it.

You can fix anything.

That’s what the next draft (which might be the 4th, or 9th, or 16th, whatever it takes) is all about; fixing what you couldn’t see because you were too close to it. When the feedback is ready make sure to take notes, ask questions, and before walking away, have a clear understanding of exactly what your beta reader is telling you. Even if you disagree, be clear on what they feel didn’t work. Then take those notes and put them away for a day.

Chances are you’ll be a mixture of desperately wanting to jump right in and fix any blemish, and furious that it was there in the first place. But give yourself time to adjust to the feedback. It’ll feel overwhelming, but once you start to tackle one issue after another you’ll see the full solution. As we mentioned before, sometimes those solutions were already there in the first draft and need to be added back in.

Come up with a game plan before you turn your computer back on. This way you’re not going over and over the same sections. At times it will go smoother than you think, other times it will drag. But you’ll get there. Every problem is solvable and when you’re done, you’ll have a completed manuscript!

Editing: Structure

Posted on October 13, 2016 by D Standard 1

So you’ve gone through and tightened your plot, strengthened your characters, confirmed that the dialogue is realistic, and shaped your world until it was so tangible you forgot you didn’t live there. Congratulations! You have a solid second draft! Feels good, doesn’t it?

Charlie dancing

Now it’s time… to create the (drum roll) THIRD DRAFT. We know what you’re thinking: wait, shouldn’t I be taking a break? Reconnecting with Netflix and friends? Or just Netflix?

editing-structure-netflix

Sorry, but no. You’re on a roll and you need to keep rolling.

Editing requires discipline and momentum. Whether you’re working on it eight hours a day every day, or during your forty-five minute lunch break Monday through Friday, or grabbing 20 minutes before your commute every day, you’re doing some serious work. Don’t stop now.

Serendipitously, your third draft will be all about momentum. Does your story have it? Is there a pace and/or structure that’s keeping the reader turning the page?

This is where you have to make some hard decisions about the structure of your story. Are you going to follow the classic formats (three act structure, eight point arc, etc.) or follow your own? Are you going to have a change in narration or setting with each chapter/break? Are you going to have one chapter flow into the next, or end each break on a cliffhanger, so when your reader says they’re just going to read one more chapter before bed, they wind up finishing the book at three in the morning — loving and kind of hating you when their alarm goes off the next morning?

While it’s tempting to fall back on classic structures and forcing your story into a mold, we recommend reading through what you have so far first. Chances are you’ll see some kind of structure already peeking through. It may be close to a classic format or it might be something completely new. Do what feels right for the story. The key is that it’s consistent throughout. Once you decide on your structure, make sure the work follows the shape from beginning to end. You shouldn’t ask your readers to fight to stay in your story — especially at three in the morning.

Once your story has a firm shape, like everything in life, it’s all about the details. You’ll need to go into every arc, scene, act and/or chapter and make sure they each achieve something that furthers the plot — whether it establishes an aspect of the setting, a facet of your character(s) or moves the action forward. Break down your story into smaller stories and make sure that they are essential.

If they aren’t essential, you have to either give them more depth, or cut them loose.

edit-structure-rose

Just remember, if you really love a scene and desperately want to keep it, chances are it’s trying to say something but isn’t quiet there yet. Work on it, find its meaning and let it shine through.

Your number one task is to be brutally honest with yourself, though; if you can’t make it work, no matter how much you love it and how good it is on its own, it will only hurt the whole piece. Chocolate is amazing, but not on a steak. So if a scene doesn’t fit, even if the writing is impeccable, cut it. But paste it to a new document.

Who knows, it could be the pivotal ingredient to the second course/sequel!*

*Finish what you’re working on now first though!

Editing:World-building

Posted on September 1, 2016 by D Standard 4

We’re all familiar with world-building in sci-fi and fantasy. The religions, politics, powers, and ancient mythology (and, yes, even the trade laws) that exist in Star Wars, Star Trek, the MCU, and the Potter-verse. But world-building isn’t just for magical characters wielding all-powerful technology.

Magical character? Check. Wielding all-powerful technology? Check.

No matter the genre, the world in which your story takes place is more than just a backdrop to invoke a location (like a white sheet behind a stage to show an empty sky). Your setting is literally and figuratively your characters’ world. It has/will shape them, and possibly crush or inspire them.

The first step to building your world (and ensuring it’s presented in just the right way when you’re editing) is to decide how much influence you want the setting to have. Will it enrich each scene in subtle, nuanced ways (like the music subculture in Begin Again), or will your world be so vivid that it’s almost a character unto itself (like The Matrix)? Either way, just like your characters, you need to know the ins and outs of where your story unfolds. What’s its history? Its defining features? How does the air smell (if it even has air)? How does the water taste (if there’s even any water)? What does it sound like at night? Is it any different at dawn from how it is at dusk?

This also extends to culture and society: you need to know the mechanics of how your invented society functions, and how your characters work those mechanics. Mad Max: Fury Road has a fully complete society and eco-system: it’s grounded in details. Utterly insane details, to be sure, but it’s 100% consistent and feels real.

World-building, son. This photo never gets old. Ever.

If you’re so inclined, draw your world, as much as you can. If not, look for pictures, photos, paintings, etc. that both look like your world, and conjure the feelings you want your world to provoke in your characters, and in your readers. Having a visual reference can be a huge help in creating your atmosphere. If there’s a part of the world that has similar geography, go visit it and soak it in. Basically, do what you need to in order to live there in your head. Then attack your draft and make sure that feeling you have when you’re living in your world is conveyed between the action and dialogue lines, and in and between each line of your prose. Make sure every action follows the law of your world: readers and viewers have an unerring instinct for inconsistency, even if it’s felt more than thought, it will turn them away from your work. For example: if there is no air, there is no rust.

Grab your nearest copy of Harry Potter (everyone has a set of Harry Potter books in each room, right? That just us?), open it up, and see how long it takes you to figure out where Harry, Hermione and Ron are. We’re betting that in a few lines you can tell what room in Hogwarts they’re in, or which shop in Diagon Alley. (Just for the record, J.K. Rowling is a master world-builder, on every possible level — if you want to see how it’s done, read the Harry Potter books, and for a more gritty, contemporary kind of world, her Cormoran Strike crime novels, written under the pen name of Robert Galbraith).

Can never have too many of these, Harry

It’s all in the details, the feelings that bring you… well… home.

When you’re editing your story, be it script or prose, it’s important to shape your world to feel like a home. It’s your home as the creator, your characters’ home because they exist in it, and your readers’ as they escape to it.

Editing: Character

Posted on June 9, 2016 by D Standard 2

All you have to do is take a quick look at any Tumblr account and you’ll see how influential a character can be. Characters become your friends, your mentors, your inspiration for trying something you never thought of before. They can feel closer to you, at times, than your own family.

Doctor Who Tumblr

As a writer, you never know which of your creations will click with your readers. All you can do is give each character a whole life. Even if the plot doesn’t allow for you to divulge all the details, you need to know them. It’s that in-depth understanding that will come across in every move your character makes, every line of dialogue, and how they influence the plot.

So, go through your first draft and list out your characters—describe what they look like, know the key events in their past, work out who their family and friends are, even their health. What secrets are they hiding? What do they desperately want? What scares them? And, most importantly, how did they get to be in this story? Once you have those answers, you have the beginning’s of your story’s canon. And the more familiar you are with your canon—the stronger your grasp on your characters and their world—the better your story will be.

Now go through your draft again and make sure your characters’ words and actions reflect who they are.

Giving your characters those dimensions will prevent them from being flat, a cardboard cutout that you’re moving around to make your plot work out—someone the audience will forget. Think of your last plane, train or bus trip. When was the last time you saw someone generic, that didn’t have something interesting about them? It rarely happens. Everyone always has a little something of their personality peeking through. The woman in a business suit carrying a Hello Kitty lunchbox… or the little boy in a school uniform and faded, oversized army jacket. Everyone has something different and unique about them; so should your characters. Make them shine with individuality. Make them as real as the people you travel to work and/or school with. You can do this with dialogue that reflects their quick thinking and their worldview, the way they dress, the choices they make, etc.

A quick, and possibly slightly controversial, note about your main character: While it’s okay to have them exist in a story that they simply witness and report on… let’s be honest, the best stories have a protagonist that influences events, that drives the plot, even if it’s just some of the time. It’s even better if all of your characters impact the direction of the story.

Which brings us to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a great movie. A perfect movie. But, as Amy in The Big Bang Theory pointed out, Indiana Jones doesn’t seem to influence any of the events as they unfold. The story, as she describes it, would pretty much have been the same had Indy not been there. Now, this has been proven to not be the case—there are multiple ways that Indy influences what happens, but the point is that you don’t want the fans of your story to feel like Sheldon while he’s listening to Amy deconstruct one of his favorite movies.

BBT Raiders

It’s not true about Raiders; don’t let it be true about your story.

Give your characters responsibility and agency, a past, insecurities and hope. Give them life.

In turn, they’ll give your story a life of its own.

Editing: Plot

Posted on May 26, 2016 by D Standard 2

OK. Let’s recap. You wrote the first draft. You’ve given yourself a break and you’re ready to look at your work with fresh eyes. That original first draft is saved, hopefully in a few locations… you know, just in cases.

Jamie

Now it’s time to go through it and make sure you have the all-important plot.

Because the plot is your purpose for telling the story; it’s the glue that holds your masterpiece together.

Stories come to us in fits and bursts. Sometimes they flow, and other times they trickle, and often, the story you thought you were telling when you first started typing is a completely different tale by the time you’re done. Which means you have to go back and make sure that everything is cohesive.

Basically, you don’t want your work to be Rachel’s Thanksgiving dessert from Friends. Ground beef is fine, but not in a fruity dessert. Make sure you all your ingredients make either Shepherd’s Pie or an English Trifle, not some unpalatable combination of the two. (Genre-mashing can be great, but it has to be done smoothly!)

Rachel Trifle

English foods aside, you don’t want contradictions in your plot. With your characters, it can be a good thing, even a grounding thing, as long as you give solid character-based reasons for it, but with plot it can weaken your tale. This means cutting the “ground beef” out. The old kill your darlings quote applies here. You might have a great scene or awesome character, but if it undermines your plot it’ll have to be saved for another story — the one about Shepherd’s Pie, perhaps?

Everything must serve the plot. And if you’ve done your job well, plot and character will overlap majorly. Even in a case-of-the-week TV show, the cases tie back to the main characters’ season/series arcs in some way. In the CW’s Supernatural, for example, at the exact moment Sam Winchester is facing the possibility of having to sacrifice his brother Dean for the greater good, the brothers meet a girl with a werewolf sister who is out of control.

Supernatural Werewolf

If she can’t tame her sister, she’ll have to make the ultimate sacrifice and take her out. The episode is a tight standalone story, but it holds up a mirror to the brothers’ relationship and hints at what might be coming for them.

Awesome costume design detail: Sam and Dean are even wearing the same color scheme as the sisters, to help emphasize the mirroring

And remember, your plot manipulations and machinations and mechanics—and other things beginning with “m”—shouldn’t be obvious. There shouldn’t be billboards advertising “foreshadowing”… it should be subtle AND entertaining. Some of the best stories, the ones that stay with us, only reveal how it’s glued together much later in the story. (The gold standard of awesome plotting is still Die Hard, btw. Just saying).

So in this first pass of editing, focus on removing what doesn’t work. e.g. scenes that don’t further the plot or the character, or slow things down, or take your story off track in some way (no matter how much you love it), add in what’s needed to keep the plot together, and finesse each point so that the reader can’t see the working mechanics of it all. You can do this by making key plot moments funny, or action-oriented, or a major character moment… or distract the reader with flying monkeys… you’re basically being a magician and using sleight of hand, making the reader/audience see one thing, when you’re really doing something else.

Flying Monkeys

For example, in the opening minutes of Die Hard, John McClane’s seatmate on the plane tells McClane that when he gets to his hotel, he needs to take off his shoes and socks and “make fists with his toes” to relax. McClane thinks this is crazy, but when he gets to Nakatomi Plaza, he does it, and it works. You think that’s the payoff… but that’s the moment when Hans Gruber shows up, forcing McClane to spend the rest of the movie barefoot (and to run over broken glass at one point). That throwaway comment was a setup to help make things very difficult for the hero later on — something all plots need to do!

It’s a setup for a plot point that’s also a character beat… and it happens so quickly and entertainingly you don’t notice it’s either! That’s how it’s done folks

It’s true that characters can change us and scenes can stay with us, but a good, tight plot is what makes us fall in love with everything in the story. No matter what type of story you’re telling, there should always be a bit of romance between the story and the reader. The plot is how you woo them to fall in love with your work.

Editing

Posted on April 28, 2016 by D Standard 1

We’ve spoken a lot about that first draft. It’s the place where you let loose, write anything and everything that comes to mind. It’s the time to riff like you’re in minute 5 of a guitar solo and you just don’t want to stop. It’s the improv phase. Even if you had an outline.

So we’re going to assume you had a blast, and now you have a first draft on your screen. A big, beautiful, messy, crazy first draft.

You, staring at that first draft like…

What now?

Now, you get ready to edit.

When editing, you’ll focus on a myriad of things: plot, character, world-building, scenes, beats, every line of dialogue… every line… every word…. We’ll look at these in more detail in future posts, but right now, we recommend doing what will feel so unnatural to you: set that first draft aside for a while.

Not for too long — you don’t want to lose your momentum — but you need to give yourself time to recharge, refresh, and, most importantly, readjust your thinking. This time away can be whatever you need: finishing an episode, or season, or — let’s be honest — a series, on Netflix, having a get-together with all those friends you’ve been neglecting since you were captured by your muse, or just a long walk to see what the world outside of the one you just created looks like.

It’s also not a bad idea to take this time to clear your schedule. If your first draft is a 50 yard dash, editing is the 26.2 mile marathon and you’re going to need to set aside time to keep up a good pace.

The first draft was the raw material. Editing is engineering, where you hone and craft and rebuild and shore up and make sure your story has narrative load bearing walls… ok, enough construction metaphors, but you do have to think that way a little bit.

Now you have to roll up your sleeves, and get ready to make thousands of changes.

Oh yes. Remember when in The Martian, Matt Damon is facing a terrifying, unwieldy, seemingly impossible situation, and his response was how he was gonna science the shit out of it? That’s you, right now.

You, solving a narrative problem while editing. Promise.

You kind of want to go back to Netflix right now, don’t you? Resist the urge! You can celebrate with Orange Is The New Black (or your fifteenth Gilmore Girls rewatch) when you finish your second draft.

For now, trust that you work has genius. It’s there, glorious and beautiful — you just have to bring it to light. Put on your shades, because now it’s time to get to work…

tom cruise sunglasses

First drafts

Posted on April 14, 2016 by D Standard 2

You came up with a great idea. A killer idea! You made some notes in your phone, or your current favorite writing notebook, on post-its, old envelopes, or even on your laptop. You pictured scenes while listening to awesome songs.You can imagine the movie version so clearly! (that guy from Teen Wolf would crush the lead role, right?)

That one

There’s just one teeny, tiny technicality: you have to actually write the damn thing.

Which is where the beautiful, messy pain of first drafts comes in.

Whether you’ve put together an outline, like we talked about before (which makes the draft your second step), or whether you’re an organic-style improviser and this is your first time putting words on a page for your story, you still need to get your raw material together. Outline or not, roadmap or not, you still need to start this journey and tackle a first draft.

And oh, that first draft is a complex beast for us writers. On the one hand, it’s truly amazing: you can write ANYTHING YOU WANT. You’re free flowing, improvising, letting those gorgeous ideas flow right from the muse and onto your page. You can write [make this better] and [funny line here] and [science this later], and that’s okay! You can write alternate versions of the same scene, or of the same line of dialogue. You can write out of sequence. You can write whatever you want.

This is what first drafts feel like. Cool.

The key thing is, you’re WRITING. You’re getting your story down. Even more than that, you’re putting the heart and soul of your story on the page (the body and brain of it will show up later… right now you’re dealing with the essence of your story).

This is where we turn to that pesky other hand.

It’s probably not very good.

There. We said it. #SorryNotSorry

Your dialogue probably won’t be diamond-sharp or leaping off the page with fresh, vivid originality. Your scenes likely won’t start or end the way you want them to. Your characters might not do the things you need them to do. There will be lots of those comments like [make this better]. Everything will be really, really messy. Mind-bogglingly messy. At the exact midpoint of cleaning out your closets messy, when apparently everything you own is scattered all around you and NOTHING MAKES SENSE ANYMORE. It’s like you’re building a house, and this is the stage where it looks like you’re actually destroying one instead. Basically, it will feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.

But here’s the thing. It’s all okay. Why, you ask? How could all that possibly be okay?!

Because that first draft is actually PERFECT.

Wait, what?

Yep. It’s perfect, because it contains everything you need to make a wonderful, amazing story. All your jumping off points are there. Your characters are there. The things they need to say are there, in one form or another. And, most importantly, the solutions to pretty much all your narrative problems are going to be there too. You just might not realize it. This is why it’s so important to NEVER EVER EVER CENSOR yourself when writing a first draft. LIKE, EVER. If it comes into your mind, put it on the page.

Everything you write is a clue or a seed or a possibility. You might find, when you’re editing your big finale, that you need a thing, or a character, or a piece of information. The great news is, whatever that thing is that you need, it’s probably lurking somewhere earlier in that first draft. Because first drafts are perfect, gorgeous things.

No story can exist without a first draft. Having an ungainly, unwieldy mess of a document is an incredible thing, because it means your story is now on the road. It didn’t even have wheels before and now it’s rolling down the writing highway. It still needs a few other things (by few we mean like, thousands), but it’s on the move, and you can see that signpost up ahead that says Editsville is the next stop). As Shannon Hale said, writing a first draft is like shoveling sand into a box so that you can build castles later. You can’t build a sandcastle without the sand, people. The first draft gives you all the raw material you need. And it’s exhilarating.

But trust us… it’s not as exhilarating as the next phase: editing. This is where your story’s soul will be crafted, finessed and sculpted into something cleaner, shinier… gleamier? The soul will not change. You cannot break your story and you cannot break its soul. Editing will take it to a higher plane of existence, man.

Yeah

But we’ll talk about that next time. For now, luxuriate in knowing that you managed to put an entire version of your story on the page.

You’re amazing!

Editing your short film

Posted on December 24, 2015 by D Standard 1

Once you’ve got all your shots in the can, only one step remains: edit that sucker!

This step is many things: daunting, exhausting, thrilling, exhilarating. It’s where your movie becomes the movie it’s meant to be.

Assuming you’re all digital and not piecing together actual strips of celluloid, editing falls into a few key stages.

Watch all your footage. How long this takes depends on how much you shot. You’ll want to check out every second of every take, and make notes on things that worked or didn’t work (e.g., your actor did a great reaction 3m 42s into take 5, their co-star delivered the perfect line in response 3m 50s into take 8…). Make these detailed notes, with the times of the things that worked (or didn’t work), so that you have a complete list of every shot, and which moments you might want to use. See you in a couple of months.
Assemble. Not like the Avengers. This can be the most painstaking stage of all. This is you putting together your assembly, or rough cut. Mashing together different shots to see what works. It helps to be ultra-organized here: go line by line, reaction by reaction. Re-watch your clips for each beat, note down which parts of which shots you want to put next to each other, and away you go. Try out those combinations. If they don’t work, try different variations. (Yoda will be ok with all that trying, we promise). As you put your clips into your editing software, and then cut the small snippets of each one as you construct your movie beat by beat, you can mess with shortening them, intercutting them differently, experimenting with shots from different angles… Some takes are faster than others — you can see what speeds work, and adjust the clip lengths. Maybe that long pause that seemed to work on the day doesn’t now that it’s in context — so you can edit it down and make the scene fly. It’s mind-bogglingly slow and detailed work, but it’s fascinating and thrilling to watch your story coming together.
Connecting an external monitor so you’re not looking at your clips in a little 3×2 inch box is extremely helpful…
Continuity. You might be putting together your favorite shots to construct an argument that’s happening — but then you notice your actor’s hair is different (maybe they brushed it behind one ear in one shot, and the other ear in a different shot), or they’re leaning forward in one moment, then leaning right back the next. It’s not just about being guided by the best performances — you have to make sure the visuals flow and what’s happening matches up from shot to shot. So if your actor leans forward from one angle, you might cut to the next shot from a different angle that shows them continuing to move — this gives your movie flow and a good kinetic energy. The audience may or may not specifically notice, but they’ll certainly feel it. Watch out for cups moving around the table if the actors picked them up during the scene, or glasses getting more or less full, or any prop/furniture movement. There are a million details, and you need to see them all.
Audio. Be prepared to separate your sound from your visuals. You might need to take a line from one take where you’re looking at actor A, and lay it over the reaction shot where you’re looking at actor B. Or take some “room tone” from one take, and lay it over a gap in another take where you had to cut out the sound of someone banging into a table. You might need to take dialogue from an entirely different moment and lay it over a shot where it doesn’t belong in order to create a beat that wasn’t there before. The possibilities are endless. So play with it. Have fun. Editing is where your movie is truly written, so embrace the “anything can happen” feeling!
Polishing and cleaning. Once you have a rough cut, with your audio cut together too, you need to embark on the next phase: cleaning everything up. This means fine tuning each and every transition from one clip to the next to make sure your movie is tight and flows cleanly and dynamically. You’ll also work on your audio, adjusting the EQ, dealing with hiss or other extraneous noise, increasing volume in a quiet take, or reducing it if people start shouting and making the sound distort. It also means adding sound effects, e.g. footsteps, doors opening, cups clinking, background ambient noise, etc. Whatever you need to add that extra dimension to your story and evoke the world that your characters are living in.
Audio clips for days… Editor’s sanity not pictured.
Color Correction. Technically part of the cleanup, this is a step unto itself, as you adjust exposure, shadows, color, saturation, in order to make your image rich and dynamic. You can really give your scenes life, warmth and a cinematic feel with this step.
Music. If you need music for your movie, this is the time to add it. Once your picture is locked, sound cleaned up, color corrected, you can add the soundtrack.
Credits. It’s up to you how and where the credits go, but they should be unobtrusive in the sense that they must fit your story and your mood. They can be simple, or they can be David Fincher in Seven-style insane (and awesome). Whatever works for your movie.

Watching your clips, cataloguing them, then piecing them together into a rough cut which you then fine tune, while you get all your audio clips cleaned up and in the right place, can take weeks, even for a 10 minute short. It’s all about making each moment sing, about doing your story justice, and making sure you do your actors justice too. They’ve worked hard for you — you need to choose moments that show them off.

Editing is where it all comes together, and the true identity of your movie becomes clear. What you thought it was, what you thought you shot on the day… that all falls away. You work with what’s there, and what’s there will tell you what works. It’s incredibly thrilling and fulling. And never more so than when you screen the finished product for the first time!