How I Edit My Manuscripts Step-By-Step 📚✨

Mariana Vieira’s manuscript-editing workflow is built around one goal: catch the kinds of problems that slip past fast drafting—structure gaps, consistency errors, and weak connections—by moving the work through multiple tools and reading modes. She starts with “book notebooks,” physical brain-dump notebooks for each manuscript, where she stores worldbuilding details, character backstories, political systems, and other material that may never appear directly on the page but still adds texture. When revision time comes—such as after receiving an agent’s notes—she scans the main topics needing attention and records them in the notebook to estimate the scope of the work.

From there, she transfers those revision conclusions into a spreadsheet designed for story-level tracking. The spreadsheet includes a “Beat Map plotter” that outlines story beats chapter by chapter, including when each beat occurs and how it lands in page and word-count terms. She also maintains a dedicated edits list, where each change is tied to a chapter and marked with a status (done, needs to be done, in progress, or cancelled). This structure matters because it makes revisions shareable with her agent—spreadsheets are easier to send than photos of paper notes.

Next comes the developmental editing pass inside Scrivener. She uses Scrivener’s binder to scan chapters and names them with one-line summaries of what happens in each chapter. For chapters requiring major revision, she adds a prominent red marker (a big red circle) so the heavy-lift sections stand out. She then works through the manuscript in order, even if that means revisiting chapters in between, to ensure the overall story still holds together.

Once the major edits are complete, she exports the manuscript to Microsoft Word using the manuscript format and Times New Roman. In Word, she performs a formatting check and then re-runs her spreadsheet checklist to confirm each planned edit actually made it into the document. This step often surfaces export-related issues—especially consistency problems or tie-pose errors—so she treats Word as a quality-control checkpoint before sending anything onward.

After that, she switches to a reader’s mindset by sending the Word document to her Kindle and reading the full manuscript like a leisure book rather than hunting for line-level fixes. She uses Kindle annotations to mark where changes should happen later, drawing lines and leaving notes that guide the next revision round. She also highlights sentences she believes can be cut to reduce word count without harming plot, dialogue, or flow.

Finally, she creates a buffer between the Kindle read and the correction pass on her laptop—typically a couple of days, or up to a week when possible, otherwise at least a few hours or the next morning. She then revisits the annotated pages, corrects typos and issues in Word, ensures everything is clean except Track Changes, and sends the updated file to her agent. The through-line is deliberate repetition: because she drafts and reads quickly, she builds in extra rounds to catch small problems and preserve smooth narrative flow.