Working definition
A structural edit is the revision of a complete draft at the level of the decisions that span more than one scene: what the book promises its reader and what question it asks, whose book it is and how its times and threads are arranged, the shape of the whole (the protagonist’s change, the narrowing of the middle, the schedule of disclosure, the ending), and the joins between its units. Its unit of attention is the book, and its material is the draft as it stands, read as a set of decisions rather than as a sequence of pages. A structural edit may end in a rewrite, a scene drafted again from a statement of what it must do, or in a revision, a change made in place, and it usually ends in both.
The structural edit is distinguished from two later kinds of work. A line edit revises sentences and paragraphs inside a scene for sense, rhythm, economy and voice; it takes the scene’s job as given. A copy-edit checks correctness and consistency: spelling, grammar, house style, and the continuity of facts such as names, dates and the colour of a coat. Publishers’ editors call the first of the three a developmental or structural edit, and the order of the three in a publishing house, structure, then line, then copy, is itself an order of dependence: there is no point in correcting the spelling of a paragraph that is going to be cut. The writer’s own edit follows the same order for the same reason, and a writer who edits alone is doing all three jobs, which is why she is tempted to do them at once.
Two further terms come from the chapter’s own instruments. The book map is a table with one row for each scene of a draft, recording where it falls, when and where it happens, through whose eyes, in which thread, what changes in it and what it deposits for later. The revision ladder is the order in which the decisions of a book are checked and repaired, from the decisions that the others depend on down to those that depend on everything; each level is a rung. Both are set out in The Mechanism and The Taxonomy.
Adjacent terms
The order of dependence is the relation the ladder records. One decision depends on another when changing the second can make the first wrong, and changing the first cannot make the second wrong. A chapter break depends on the arrangement of the book’s times, because moving a strand can leave a break that no longer falls where a question opens; the arrangement does not depend on the break, because moving a break leaves the strands where they were. Dependence is a property of decisions, not of pages: the opening pages come first in the book and depend on almost everything after them.
Planning and editing use the same order. A writer who outlines before drafting makes the decisions at the top of the ladder first and drafts the scenes last, and a writer who drafts first and discovers the book in the drafting makes the same decisions afterwards, in the edit. The ladder serves both, as an order of decisions rather than of drafts.
The plant audit of The Ending (Chapter 16) traces everything an ending rests on to the place it was planted. It is a test of the ending against the book, and the structural edit uses it as the last test of the shape of the whole. The chapter’s other neighbours are the diagnostic tests of every earlier chapter, each of which tests the text at one level; this chapter says in what order to run them and what to do with what they find.
What this chapter leaves to others
This chapter adds no test of the text. Every test it orders belongs to the chapter that defines it, and the instruments it reads off the book map (the order chart, the option list, the criterion log, the disclosure map, the promise inventory and the rest) are defined and justified in their own chapters. The tests in this chapter are tests of the edit: whether it is being done in an order that will hold, whether each repair has been checked against what it disturbs, and whether it is finished.
The line edit and the copy-edit are outside the book’s subject, which is structure. The consolidated symptom index and the master checklist, which gather every chapter’s symptoms and checklists in one place, are in the appendices; this chapter gives a short table from symptom to rung, enough to start an edit, and leaves the full index to them. The working relation between a writer and an editor, and the questions it raises about whose book an edited book is, are touched on in the full treatment, section 8, and not otherwise treated.
See also: the full treatment, section 1, with the working definitions in one place.