An Edict on Editing
I got caught up in a thread in a writing forum this week because it managed to both pique my curiosity and insult my work at the same time. The topic was on the matter of editing and paying someone to professionally do it for you, and whether not an author could serve as their own editor. Obviously, they can as many of us don’t have the hundreds of dollars to shell out to some low to mid-grade writer’s service or the thousands of dollars to get the true professionals, so we invariably serve as our own editors. The better question then is should they? Is it possible at all to serve as both the writer and editor of a novel?
My answer is yes.
But there are a lot of caveats to this.
Firstly, you need to decided what kind of editing you are content with receiving. Are you looking for a sophisticated spelling, grammar, and flow check only? Provided you have some skill or experience in editing- working at a newspaper or magazine, being a paid freelancer for a while, etc.- or have a very good understanding of English grammar. I.e. You’re not learning about active and passive voice for the first time; you know the difference between gerunds, participial phrases, and infinitives; or you can tell at sight an appositive from a nominative absolute, you might be able to handle this yourself.
If, however, you’re looking for content editing, probably best to leave that to the pros. Our stories are like melodies, the ones you write always sound better to you. It is pretty hard to divorce yourself from your own writing, because you understand the story so well already. Your brain intuitively fills in the gaps because you know the subject so well already. That’s also giving no consideration to the fact that axing a section of your book is essentially deleting hours of work. That can be a hard thing to do, and it becomes easier to convince yourself that certain parts that add no real value do belong in the novel.
Now, a couple pieces of advice for those who want to try self-editing.
Set it aside for a while before doing that first read through. Start working on your next project before you dive into the editing process of your current project. Try and let yourself forget some aspects of the story to help you avoid the automatic gap-filling your brain does. (It also makes the book more enjoyable on that first read through.)
Dissect it and quickly. Do another read through just for internal story consistency, pacing, plotting, etc. and do it fast. Depending on the size of the book, take no more than 1-3 days doing it, so you can keep the whole story arc fresh in your mind as you look for inconsistencies. Use Word’s commenting ability to leave yourself notes as you go if you find sections you don’t like or possible problems. Don’t get bogged down at this point. Find all the problems now.
Work your solutions. All those things you found in your reading blitz, now’s the time to hit them, fix them, and polish them until you’re happy.
Read it out loud. Yes, this is time consuming, but yes, it’s worth it. Your brain is actually a much better reader than we give it credit for- it can auto-correct certain spelling errors, transposed words, sentences that don’t flow correctly, etc. without us noticing much of the time. You don’t even have to be dyslexic. Reading it out loud forces the words to come off the page exactly as you have written them without your brain and eyes doing any of their compensation tricks.
You’re probably asking yourself why you should listen to any advice I have on this subject. Apart from a customer review where the reviewer commented that I had clearly paid for an editor (I hadn’t), a brief stint as an editor at a local paper, and having gone to a school that made its own grammar book, because the other grammar books were not thick and all-inclusive enough, I got nothing.
Cheers.