Don't Make the Bed if the House Is on Fire

On organizing your editorial process, and overcoming the conflict of interests inherent to revision

Aug 06, 2025

When I was coming up in the publishing industry, a mentor gave me a piece of editing advice that has come to define my entire editorial ethos:

Don’t make the bed if the house is on fire.

In other words: fix the big stuff before the small stuff.

This sounds obvious, but wisdom is often obvious. It’s also one of those golden rules that everyone agrees with in principle but no one follows. This is partly due to some fuzziness around what we consider “big stuff” vs. “small stuff,” and partly due to everyone believing they are the exception (“I’ll fix the big stuff and the small stuff at the same time!”).

The reason to fix big stuff before small stuff is that edits have a ripple effect. Even changing something minor, like the placement of a couch, requires you to go back through and update the sentences where the couch appears. The bigger the change, the more you’re going to knock out of place. Changing a character’s name might seem small, but going from a one-syllable name to a three-syllable name will tilt the rhythm of your sentences. Moving a flashback later will ruin all the earlier references to that flashback. Consolidating two characters requires a whole rewrite. Changing your mind about the ending—turns out you’ve written a tragedy, not a comedy—is going to ripple into every sentence of your story, requiring new inflections of tone, new foreshadowing, new characterization cues.

If you start by editing the small stuff—or if you do what everyone does, which is go at the edits haphazardly all at once—you will spend a lot of hours perfecting scenes that, in the eleventh hour, will turn out not to belong in the book. You will dutifully make the bed with tight hospital corners—and then you’ll have to go hose down the conflagration of your house, and the bed will be half soggy and half charred, and you’ll probably have to buy a new bed anyway.

This might seem totally fine to you. So what, some hours get wasted, that’s always the case when writing and editing. You’ve got time and creativity to spare; you don’t mind if you have to undo and redo some of your work.

The trouble is, whatever you polish, you will find harder to throw away. The sunk cost fallacy rears its head here. The more times a paragraph, a stanza, an opening chapter has been edited and revised and tucked in, the more rigid it becomes. I talked about this some in last week’s newsletter on novel revision, but here I want to focus on how that habit of polishing actually impedes the editing process.

Let’s say you’re working on a novel about a zombie apocalypse. All the survivors have gathered for safety in an Amazon warehouse. Your main characters are the rich assholes who run the place, and they’re going to be gradually brought down by their own egos and the onslaught of zombie attacks. You’ve gone through four drafts of the novel. The characters are memorable, the dialogue is sharp, you’ve got some really great gory scenes of the CFO’s head getting crunched up in zombie jaws… And then one of the readers of your final draft says, “I just don’t buy that these rich people would get stuck in an Amazon warehouse. Wouldn’t it be more believable if they holed up in somebody’s mansion, and the zombies came after them there?”

The odds that you’re going to take this feedback and run with it are nil. Even if it’s spot on, and watching the zombies wear down the fortress layers of a secluded McMansion à la “The Masque of the Red Death” is the more interesting story, you’re not going to do it, because it would require a total rewrite of a manuscript that is already “nearly there.” If you can just add one more layer of polish, maybe this version will work! The more hours you put into a piece of writing, the less capable you become of hearing (really hearing) critical feedback. Whereas if your friend had given you this feedback after reading the messy first draft of your zombie story, you might have been perfectly willing, maybe even excited, to give the McMansion draft a go.

This is not to say that you’re doomed if you put a lot of editing work into a story before you get the crucial, blow-it-all-up piece of feedback. It’s just going to take some heroism to look your pristine, proofread, finely wrought draft in the eye and then light the fuse.

So let’s talk about the other side of feedback: the person giving it. We tend to assume that good writers are also good editors. This isn’t always true. The most common flaw I see in editorial feedback (in workshops, in writing circles, among publishing professionals, you name it) is the inability to prioritize. This is why, in a workshop, one of your classmates might say in the same breath, “I thought it was a little unrealistic that all these rich people would end up in this warehouse” and “I wanted some backstory on the CFO’s childhood.” This is also why it drives me crazy when publishing industry professionals jump straight to line edits, without fixing the really huge overarching problems in the story.1

If we accept the premise that big issues should be fixed before small issues, it follows that big issues should be communicated before small issues.

Whenever I’m training interns on how to give editorial feedback, I encourage them to read the manuscript thinking about “obstacles to enjoyment.” What are the biggest obstacles to your enjoyment of this story? Rank them. When you’re giving feedback to the author, communicate #1 first. Then #2. And so on until you’ve communicated all the obstacles to your enjoyment of the story in order of significance, or until your editorial letter has reached such a length that it’s in danger of making the author throw in the towel entirely. If there are 7 obstacles to your enjoyment of the story, but Obstacles 1 and 2 are massive, it’s totally fine to communicate Obstacles 1 and 2 and save 3-7 for the next draft.

The reasons for this approach are intuitive, but still worth listing:

Writers should swallow the biggest pill first. A writer will be understandably annoyed if your feedback reads, “Love the story! Not totally sure about the scene in Chapter 16—maybe shorten it a little? Also, I think you should cut one of the two protagonists.” If you can get them to accept the toughest feedback first, they’ll read the rest of your feedback with relief.

Solving big problems often solves smaller problems. This is where the ripple effect finally pays off. It is amazing how often addressing Obstacles 1 and 2 magically takes care of obstacles 3, 5, and 6. This is another reason that editing out of order creates more work: when you’re making the right decisions, a story starts to do the work for you.

It forces you to organize your thinking. Which is the bigger problem: an exasperating, narcissistic protagonist, or a wannabe lyrical prose style?2 It can be really tricky to sort out the reasons you’re frustrated with a book. Ordering your feedback by significance forces you to actually ask yourself: What do I want this writer to do? And, How important is it that they do it?

You may not be in a position where you’re regularly giving writers feedback. But if you are a writer, you’ll probably be asked now and then to read over the work of your classmates, friends, rivals, nemeses, and acquaintances. It’s worth learning to do this well, because that ability to sort out editorial priorities will (1) endear you to other writers and (2) make you a better editor of your own work.

Admittedly, the transfer of these skills isn’t straightforward—good luck ranking the obstacles to your enjoyment of your own book—but the more practiced you are in being honest about other people’s work, the better equipped you are to be honest about your own.

So now we get back to you and your zombie novel. Let’s assume you’re at least somewhat convinced by the idea that big issues should be solved before small issues. The thing you need is a reader who will tell you what the big issues are, so you can avoid wasting time futzing around with the small stuff.

What if you don’t have one of those readers?

You’re going to have be your own honest editor. The reason this is hard (besides the fact that we’re all terrible evaluators of our own work) is that there’s a major conflict of interests here. As editor, your wish is to make the story as good as possible. As writer, your wish is to do as little work as possible.

You know that feeling when you’re reading through a draft and you feel a subliminal twinge? Your brain catches on a line, you look at it again, you try to rewrite it, you undo-last, and then you think—eh, it’s probably fine.

This is your writer self winning out over your editor self. Your writer self is a lot stronger in these moments, because they’re the one actually responsible for fixing things—without their cooperation, nothing gets done. This power imbalance gets even more extreme the bigger the issues get. “I’m a little concerned that this premise isn’t believable,” says your editor self. “It is too believable because if it wasn’t I’d have to redo everything so shut up,” says your writer self.

I have a legendarily bad habit of shouting down my editor self3, so if you’re feeling called out by this whole two-wolves-inside-you dilemma, I promise you I have it worse. “Do you think we should maybe reread this first draft before sending it out to journals?” says my editor self. “Fuck you. This is raw genius,” says my writer self, and clicks submit.

As a result, I’ve been trying for a long time to find a workaround that would allow me to apply the editorial skills I’ve worked so hard on developing to the stuff I’ve actually written. I have a method that’s been working for me lately, and I’m going to share it, with the usual disclaimer that anyone trying to push their writing process on you is suspect and trying to prove something, and that you should do whatever works best for you.

The Dissociative Method

First step: finish a draft of something.

Second step: set it aside for a long time. As long as you can stand to. Longer. You’ll know you’ve set it aside for long enough if your own sentences surprise you when you finally return to the draft.4

Third step: print out the whole draft, single-spaced.5

Fourth step (the big step): Read back through the draft with a pen in hand. Read it as though you’re just trying to enjoy the story—as if it’s someone else’s work. When you snag on something (an obstacle to enjoyment), mark it in the margins as follows:

AWK PHRASING - FIX
SCENE DOESN’T GO ANYWHERE - FIX
CHAR MOTIVATIONS NOT MAKING SENSE - WHY WOULD HE CARE ABOUT THE RABBIT
CONFUSING - NEED MORE WORLD-BUILDING HERE
DESCRIPTION SLOWS DOWN THE SCENE - PARE DOWN
LAME CHAPTER ENDING - WE CAN DO BETTER - FIX

What you’re doing here is separating the role of noticing from the role of fixing. When you assign those two roles to the same person, the penalty for noticing things is having to fix them. You’re hardly incentivized to notice a problem when you’re the one who has to solve it. But if you can separate those roles—if you can convince yourself the two roles are separate—your editor self can notice things and point them out, with the reassurance that the fixing of those things will be someone else’s problem.

Fifth step (also a big step): Go back into your word document, this time as your writer self, and follow your editor self’s instructions. You have to trust them completely—if they tell you a scene needs to be rewritten from scratch, believe them. You are an underling. You do not have veto power. Fix everything they told you to fix, even the stuff that you’re pretty sure is basically more or less fine the way it is.

Sixth step: After you’ve fixed everything according to the specifications of your editor self, set the manuscript aside for a little while (not as long this time), then reread. You don’t have to print the whole thing out every time—if you made great strides on the last draft, little cosmetic touches in the word document might suffice for this round of edits. If, however, you have that nagging feeling that something is still off, you’ll want to back up to Step 1 and repeat the process.

What you’ve probably guessed about this method, but what I’ll make extra clear just to be safe, is that your editor self still needs to follow the golden rule: fix the big issues first. If there’s a central flaw in your premise, it’s the job of your editor self to point it out in huge capital letters on the first page of the manuscript.

ENTIRE PREMISE IS DUMB - REWRITE FROM POV OF THE ZOMBIES

If your editor self notices that a chapter needs to be cut, that editor self should cross out the entire chapter. Don’t bother trying to surgically improve individual lines or paragraphs. Just huge, definitive Xs across the whole thing.

This is why I recommend printing single-spaced instead of double-. Don’t leave room for your editor self to offer their own fixes. Their job is to notice problems. Your job (once you’re back to being your writer self) is to solve them.

This method has worked pretty well for me, an inveterate first-thought-best-thought anti-revision truther. It’s even a fun outlet for self-loathing, if you’ve got some of that to work through:

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY ADVERBS HERE - FIX
YOU’VE USED THAT WORD 12 TIMES IN THE LAST 4 PAGES - FIX
NARRATOR IS GETTING PREACHY & ANNOYING - FIX

So the slightly less catchy version of my mentor’s timeless advice is:

If the house is on fire, put out the fire. Then repair the floorboards. Then get the soot off the walls. Then, and only then, is it time to make the bed—if you’ve even kept the bed.

I hope this helps you organize your own editorial process. Please do send in comments, questions, and DJ-style requests; I’m happy to riff on any writing topics of niche or general interest.

Devon Halliday

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