In my roles as an editor on Medium and beyond, I’ve edited thousands of articles and written a fair few myself. I’ve also had my writing worked on and critiqued by writers far more qualified than me. Besides developing an eye for a good story, I’ve learned how to take an idea and put it down on paper in a well-written and engaging manner, with minimal fluff and maximum impact.

If you struggle with self-editing or need a structure to follow, I’ve formulated a seven-step writing and editing process that you can follow to help you get your thoughts from your brain to paper with a great story to show for it.

The brain dump

A friend of mine used to refer to this as “brain spew.” It’s a fitting term. The brain dump is the process of transferring ideas from your head onto paper, in any way or form necessary. It doesn’t matter what order it comes out in, how messy it looks, or how many mistakes it contains. As Ernest Hemingway once said, “The first draft of everything is shit.”

There is one rule of thumb to abide by: don’t stop to edit, ever. Stopping only breaks your concentration and interrupts your flow of thought, something that is hard to reignite.

The dirty edit

Now that you’ve dumped every relevant thought down — and many other non-relevant tangents — it’s time to organize this mishmash of ideas into something that makes sense. Read through what you’ve written, copying and cutting sections around. Something I do to help in this process is to write down the structure of my argument or story in a notebook (yes, in a non-digital medium), which gives me a framework to follow.

During the dirty edit, forget grammar and don’t worry about making sentences sing here; the point is to get your piece structured and flowing correctly. Your only aim should be to set out your introduction, main points, and conclusion.

The tidy edit

With your thoughts together and somewhat structured, you can start tuning the finer details, such as grammar, word choice, sentence structure, and more. In the tidy edit, you fix spelling errors, punctuation, and break down lengthy sentences. Find the wordy and multi-word phrases (you know who you are, “in order to”) and replace them with their cleaner, less clunky alternatives. I then use Grammarly to catch all the little errors that are hard to spot by eye, the most common being missing commas and incorrect use of semicolons.

At this stage, your piece should flow and read correctly.

Sleep on it

In a flood of excitement to publish, some writers throw their work out into the world the moment it’s been “edited.” In most cases, it could have been more polished, and you will have almost certainly missed some glaring mistakes. The best advice I ever received was to sleep on every draft for at least a day. It has done wonders for the quality of my work, and it has saved me from publishing some comical errors.

I can’t repeat this step enough; make sure to walk away from your work for hours, if not an entire day. Your writing — and your readers — will thank you for this one.

The clean edit

The extended break from your words allows you to examine your work with fresh eyes and perspective. This refreshed editing pass usually unearths all sorts of things that don’t make sense or aren’t necessary. Use the clean edit to tighten everything up. A good trick is to imagine that every word is costing you money. Which ones need to stay? What sentences can be rephrased? What three-paragraph sections could be shortened to one if you spent time reworking your words?

After the clean edit, you should have trimmed everything that isn’t required. Be sure to double-check your grammar after these edits. (Like many others, I recommend Grammarly, even though some of its suggestions make literally no sense at all.)

Seek peer feedback

If you have a network of fellow writers, seek feedback. I’m part of a mastermind group, and we regularly share our work with each other. It always surprises me what outside eyes spot in my drafts. Peer feedback also tests how well your ideas are hitting and how concise your message is. If your work doesn’t score well with your feedback circle, it won’t survive in the wild.

External sources of feedback also ensure that you avoid getting lost in a one-person echo chamber. It’s very easy to be convinced by your own work.

The final edit

After receiving criticism (perhaps even praise!) from a trusted outside source, give your piece a final read-through, and make the necessary amendments. I normally find an appropriate feature image at this stage, now that I have the complete picture of the story.

It might seem like overkill, but many writers fail to realize that getting your thoughts into a draft is only beginning. Without a process of editing and re-editing, your great ideas will get lost in a sea of mediocrity.

Susan Bell, the author of The Artful Edit, put it best when she wrote, “While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it’s pretty useless.”

Don’t lose your genius to bad editing practices.