One of those moments in your writing life no one really prepares you for.

You click “open,” half excited, half bracing yourself.

And there it is. Slashes of crimson, comments lining the margins, inserted words, deleted words. Enough markup to make you wonder if Microsoft Word is personally offended by your book.

And if your first thought is Wait … what am I supposed to do now? You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Nothing has gone wrong.

This part feels awkward for a reason.

Most fiction writers know how to write. Drafting, revising, reworking—those muscles are well used. But reviewing edits is different. It’s not something you learn until you’re here, looking at your own manuscript with someone else inside it. And for a lot of writers, this is their first time seeing Tracked Changes—right at the end, when the manuscript is close and everything suddenly feels a lot more important.

So the thoughts start showing up. I’m afraid I’ll mess this up. I feel like I should know what I’m doing. I don’t want to click the wrong thing and break something. (That last one is real—I’ve seen the hesitation, like one wrong click might delete the entire book.)

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: you’re not meant to know this already. This is finish-line knowledge. You weren’t supposed to master Tracked Changes back when you were still trying to get the story down. You learn this part when you reach it—not earlier, not on your own, and not as some test you have to pass before you’re taken seriously.

Feeling unsure here doesn’t mean you’re unprepared. It means you’ve moved into a new phase. And this phase isn’t about getting everything “right.” It’s about slowing down enough to see what’s in front of you—what’s changed, what still sounds like you, what you want to keep and what you don’t. Nothing is final until you accept it. Every change is a suggestion. You’re still the one deciding what your manuscript becomes.

The mechanics—the buttons, the views, the features—that’s just that: mechanical. Learnable. And if it feels overwhelming at first, that’s normal too. (I put together a simple guide that walks through it step by step if you want something to follow as you go: How to Navigate Tracked Changes)

But underneath all of that, this part isn’t really about software. It’s about the moment where your manuscript stops being something only you’ve seen … and becomes something you’re preparing to let go of. That can feel fragile at first.

And then, slowly, it doesn’t. What looks like a wall of corrections starts to settle into something much simpler—a series of decisions. And every one of them is yours to make.