Hi. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Hopefully you won’t hate me when we’re done here. Everything I suggest here is from my own experiences, lessons I had learned the hard way. I have edited for newspapers, advertising and fiction. I don’t claim to know everything, but within this article there may be something of use. Your mileage might vary.
First, accept you’ve got a mess of raw words, and concepts, and elements of a story in front of you. If you haven’t done that, don’t continue reading. This is the beginning of me being bluntly honest with you. To save space, I’m going to assume you’ve heard all this before:
“Give Yourself Permission to Write Badly.”
“Kill Your Darlings.”
“Do a pass removing X,” with X being passive voice, saidisms, etc.
Yeah, all good stuff, but if you’re reading this column, you’ve done that already. Here’s a good list of things you can use to edit your work:
http://theeditorsblog.net/2011/06/07/checklist-for-editors/
I really have little else copyediting wise that will help you mold your work into something readable. Seriously, if you can’t already do that, then you really shouldn’t consider a career as a professional writer. You’ll be required to write a good story time and again, then edit it, edit again, and then edit it again. If anyone has told you your story is precious, perfect, and can published just the way it is, don’t believe them. Your feces does stink, and no amount of “poopouri” can fix that. Mine does, too. Probably even more so than yours, so I’m not being critical, just honest.
So what am I going to tell you that will help you in this month of NaNoEdMo? Especially since I’m really not better a writer, and maybe only marginally better editor? What can I share with you, the huddled masses fervently hoping to glean some sort of wisdom?
Get your stone tablets and chisels out, because this is where I lay it down on you.
Ready?
Okay.
We cannot, will not, ever be able to edit our own work effectively. We can’t.
Not you. Not I.
That’s why we need critique groups, and first readers, and beta readers, and eventually editors. Our minds are not disciplined enough to see through our own bad mistakes. Most human minds aren’t trained to overcome the singular flaw—that we fill in the blanks as we reread our writing—thinking we’ve seen every error, but we never will. Not to level that we think we have.
Accept it. It’s okay. It’s not our job to make your work perfect. Our job is to tell a good story.
And you’ve probably already got the seeds of a brilliant story sitting in front of you. If you have no seeds, then see that line above where I said you shouldn’t be doing trying to be a professional writer.
See, this is where I throw in the twist. You all hate me right now, or are discouraged, believing that I’m just showed up here to crush your dreams. I’m not. I’m here to arm you for what you have to do.
It starts with letting it go.
We cannot edit your own work. Again, accept this. And then…wait. Wait as long as it takes. Wait until you’ve forgotten what you’ve written. Maybe that only takes you a couple days. Maybe that takes a year. Maybe it takes reading/critiquing/editing someone else’s work, in which you’ll see the errors you make and don’t think you do. Maybe you’ll have to hypnotize yourself. Doesn’t matter. For as I mentioned above, you cannot edit your own work…until…It’s no longer your work.
That’s the trick to editing your own work. See your work through the eyes of someone else, even if that someone else is you. When you read your story with clean eyes, and you wonder who wrote that horrible dialog, then you’re ready. Or until you marvel at an amazing sequence that must have been lifted from someone else’s work, then can you look at your work objectively. When you attain that distance from your work, then you can edit it, and be more confident that you’re catching what you need to catch.
This being NaNoEdMo, I know there are limitations, but if you truly set your story aside since NaNoWriMo, and you’re about to crack it open for the first time in several months, you can do this. Maybe you’ve written other things, or lost your memory in a tragic calligraphy accident, whatever…you’ve got everything you need to fix your work.
Don’t obsess about sentence structure, white space, POV and grammar when you sit down for your first fresh pass. Just read your work start to finish as if it was just delivered from Amazon (note: Yes, you should be buying from small, indie bookstores, but I told you I’d be honest with you.)
Make notes, but don’t correct anything yet. Don’t tell yourself how you’re going to fix it. Critique it as you go along like it was…you got it, someone else’s work. How would you fix this story if you’d written it? I know, it sounds sort of multiple personalityish, but just try it. (Note: Editors are allowed make up words. Check Strunk & White. It’s in there.) Save the actual labor for the next pass.
Once done, start integrating the notes and fixes. I don’t care if you do these two steps a chapter at a time, or go through the whole novel once, then go through it again. Your call. But now’s the time to put your newfound appreciation for your work into action. Tighten prose where you are verbose, balance POVs and tenses; bring the gems you read in the first pass to the surface by scraping away the mud around them. Write deeper descriptions in scenes you thought everyone would get, but you now see could be misinterpreted.
Then, when done, walk away again. But not long this time. If you wait too long, you might find yourself changing stuff back to the way it was before. Read through again, adding little touches. And then walk away again, turning it over to a critique group, or a trusted first reader, or whoever.
If you can learn to read your work outside your own head, and still enjoy the story, then other’s will, too.
Good luck and don’t hate me.
DB
02/26/18