The End Is The Beginning Editor: Jeff is Carl & Princess Donut 
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"You never know what you can do until you try,
and very few try unless they have to."
— C.S. Lewis
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff is Carl & Princess Donut  and I'm one of the regular editors of the official Noticing Newbies Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 500 newsletters across the site in that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me directly or submit feedback in the comment box at the bottom of this newsletter. |
The End Is The Beginning
The first time I remember learning that typing "The End" at the conclusion isn't actually the end of the writing process, I was showing a story to a teacher in elementary school. I'd written the whole thing out, start to finish, and I was confident that what I wrote was good. I proudly presented it to my teacher, expecting validation and compliments.
What I got instead was, "This is a really good start."
I remember being confused by that. I had written the story. All of it. What did he mean by a good start?
It took me a while to understand what he meant, and even longer to accept it. But that teacher was right, and if you're new to writing, this might be news to you too, the same way it was news to me: finishing a draft is a real accomplishment, but it's a milestone, not a finish line. There's a whole process that happens after you write "The End," the same way there's a process that happens before you write your first words in a new story.
I got a second, more formal version of this lesson a few years later, working for my high school newspaper. I learned that an article didn't just get written and then printed. It went through an editor, who'd send it back with questions and requested changes. Then a proofreader, to catch typos and grammar issues and suggest minor tweaks to improve readability. Then approval from the publisher. And all this before a single word was typeset into the issue. Nobody at that school paper treated this as a sign that the initial draft wasn't good enough; it was just how professional writing worked. Every piece of writing that reaches an audience has gone through stages after the initial writing. That's not a remedial process; it's the normal one.
So what does that process actually look like, in broad terms? Here's the general shape it tends to take, roughly in order:
Alpha readers are the earliest, most trusted set of eyes on your work; often before you've even decided the draft is finished. They're looking at the biggest possible questions: does this story work at all? Does the core idea hold up? Is there something fundamentally missing or broken that needs to be addressed before you invest more time refining sentences that might not survive a bigger structural change anyway? What did work well? What does there need to be more of? Alpha readers are the ones who help the author mold the clay of their draft into something much more refined than the initial pass.
Developmental or structural editing comes next, and it's concerned with the architecture of the piece. Does the pacing work? Does the plot hold together logically? Do the character arcs actually arc? This is often the most significant revision stage, because it can mean rewriting entire scenes or reordering chapters, not just polishing what's already there, even after you're relatively happy with your early draft(s).
Line editing refines individual sentences, word choice, voice, rhythm. By this stage, the big structural questions have been settled, and the focus shifts to making the prose itself as clear and effective as it can be.
Proofreading is the final pass: hunting for typos, grammar issues, and small inconsistencies; the kind of errors that don't affect whether the story works but absolutely affect whether a reader trusts you as a writer and sees your work as professional.
Now, here's the part I want to be honest about: not every draft needs equal amounts of work at each one of these stages, and that's going to depend on a lot of things, like how much preparation went into the piece before you ever started drafting, and your own natural strengths and weaknesses as a writer. If you're the type of writer who is a "pantser" or does a "vomit draft" where your goal is just to get the story committed to paper as quickly as possible, even if it's messy, then you're probably going to need to rely on alpha readers and developmental editing steps much more intensely than if you're the "plotter" type of writer who meticulously outlines and preps their work before ever committing a word of a chapter to paper (or screen).
I've written before about being a writer who likes to enter a first draft with some confidence in the structure already in place. Because of that, my developmental editing stage tends to be lighter than it might be for a different writer with a different process. My drafts still benefit from another set of eyes to confirm what I think is working actually is; I just tend to spend more of my revision energy at the line level than the structural one, and that's because I don't start drafting until I have a clear idea of where I want to go and how I want to get there. A writer who drafts fast and loose, on the other hand, might sail through the drafting stage but need to spend significantly more time in structural revision once the whole shape of the story is visible for the first time.
The stages exist either way. What varies is how much weight falls on each one, and that's going to be different for every writer, and honestly, different for every piece you write.
So if you've just finished a draft, congratulations! Genuinely. Finishing anything is a significant milestone, and it means you now have something to work with; something that is tangible and further than a lot of aspiring authors get. But if you're hoping that writing "The End" means the interesting work is over, I'd encourage you to see it instead as the beginning of a journey toward a well-rounded piece.
Some writers are gifted enough to write brilliant prose at the outset. For the rest of us, we're entirely capable of writing brilliant prose ourselves; we just have to be prepared to work toward it. And that journey starts at "The End."
Until next time,
Jeff is Carl & Princess Donut
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"New & Noteworthy Things" | "Blogocentric Formulations" |
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Noticing Newbies: August 12, 2026 Issue [#13897]
