Authors: Edit Yourselves!
A very incomplete guide to self-editing for authors
I need to start with a disclaimer: I am the daughter of an English teacher and a copyeditor; I used editor’s marks, copying my mother, from a young age. I’m the kind of person who reads a published book or a news article and wants to fix a bad sentence or cut the extra words. I’m annoying, I know — honestly, I annoy myself. So take my saltiness about editing with a grain of salt.
Not every author has a strong grasp of editing, nor do you need one. However, becoming a better author requires more than writing down a lot of words, then handing it off to an editor to “fix.” (Notice how I put the period inside the quote mark? Always do that.)
I rigorously edit my own work; I consider it part of the writing process. That spot on page 52 that didn’t feel quite right but I couldn’t think of a better way to say it? Maybe on the third or fourth (or fiftieth) pass, I’ll see how I can fix it. I’ve also recently been doing editing gigs for other writers, which has been illuminating. It has raised questions like, Did this person read over their manuscript before they turned it in for editing? Did they do any fact-checking?
So here’s my pitch for editing your manuscript before you turn it in, along with some editing tips from a salty bitch who knows when to use were instead of was.
Why should authors edit their manuscripts when they could pay someone to do it?
So, you’ve written a book. Yay you! The next question is what to do with it. You could show it to a few friends, pat yourself on the back a dozen times, and take yourself out for drinks to celebrate.
But you don’t want that. Your words are important. Your story moved you and you want to share it with the world.
At this point, many new authors go looking for an editor to tell them what to do next. That’s not a terrible idea, especially if you have some money to invest in your project. A developmental editor could help you shape the story better. A line editor can clean up your messy sentences. A proofreader can catch the typos. If writing a book was a one-off for you, this might be where you get off the writing train and onto the publishing train.
But outsourcing all the revisions probably won’t do much to make you a better writer. And you could easily spend several thousand dollars for editing a full-length manuscript — more if it’s a big old mess. And professional editors will do their best to make your work readable, but it’s not their job to ensure that your vision shines through. No one but you can make sure that happens.
If you want to be a professional writer —if you think that, maybe, you have more than one book in you (or if you’re just short on cash) — editing yourself will make you a better writer.
Tips for editing your own work
I understand that the pressure of publishing deadlines, and if you self-publish, the pressure to get your work out there and start making sales, isn’t always compatible with thorough self-editing. Honestly, I’m trying to be less perfectionist and not trip if every sentence doesn’t sparkle. Plot, character, swoon (if you write romance, like me), and tension are more important to readers than whether you wrote “different than” instead of “different from.” No one — other than me — has ever DNF’d a book because of bad grammar.
So maybe you don’t have time to polish your prose to a high shine. Do give it at least a light dusting, though. Your readers and editors will thank you.
Contract your verbs
I thought this was just me until I started editing other people’s work and found it is it’s common: I write my first draft as if I never heard of a contraction. Real people say, “It’s hot out,” not, “It is hot out.” If none of your to be verbs are contracted, your language will sound stilted, especially when it’s coming out of your characters’ mouths.
There are exceptions to this, of course. A character for whom English is a second language or someone who’s stiff and formal might not use contractions. If your narration and the rest of your characters do, that character who doesn’t will stand out; the way they use language becomes part of the story of who they are and makes your book richer.
You might also skip the contraction for emphasis: “He was not at the scene of the crime.”
A first step in a self-edit might be a contraction check: where do you want to make your language flow and where do you want to stop the reader for emphasis or to show character?
That isn’t all that
It’s a fact that you can cut “that” out of many of the sentences where you want to use it. I can usually shorten a manuscript by hundreds if not thousands of words simply by removing unnecessary “thats.”
The same applies to other unnecessary words. “She looked across the room and saw movement behind the curtain” is better as “She saw movement behind the curtain.”
It’s okay to write a loooong book but make sure the story justifies this. I don’t need to read dozens of extra pages of all the garbage words you didn’t bother to edit out.
Pick out those pesky tics
I’m sure some writers don’t have tics — turns of phrase they overuse when they’re drafting. Maybe Stephen King spits out perfect first drafts, but I don’t and I doubt many authors do.
My most annoying tic is “she heard him say.” If he’s speaking, of course she heard him. I do this all the time and I have to expunge it when I edit myself.
Some of those tics might come from how we speak. I recently edited an author who liked to insert “some” where it didn’t belong, as in, “Some 300 people…” I shaved a couple of pages off the manuscript just getting rid of unneeded “somes” and a few other tics. That author might speak that way and it might be part of his character. On the page, those extra words become a barricade the reader has to climb over to get to the meat of the story. Don’t make them make that climb.
Passive voice should be used sparingly by authors
Oh. My. God. I hate this. I’ve seen authors tie sentences in knots just to avoid telling me who the eff is doing the effing action. Passive voice often requires extra words and extra mental gymnastics of your readers. I’m not saying to never use it — scratch that: Do. Not. Use. Passive. Voice. Period.
What is passive voice and how will I know when I see it? Glad you asked. Here are some examples, in passive and rewritten into active voice.
There stood three trees at the crossroads for a hundred years.
Three trees had stood at the crossroads for a hundred years.
She was given a new dress by her aunt.
Her aunt gave her a new dress. — This puts the emphasis on the aunt.
She wore the new dress her aunt gave her. — The dress is more important in this sentence.
The active voice is like a fresh spring breeze. Aah.
There are a few instances where you can use the passive voice. For example, sometimes you don’t know who did the thing. But mostly keep your sentences active. Nothing marks you as an amateur more than the overuse of the passive voice.
Check your facts; no one else will
When I’m writing a first draft, I just want to get the words down. If I go down a research rabbit hole, I can totally derail my writing day. But when I edit, I check the names of places, the dates of real events, etc. If I don’t, an eagle-eyed reader is bound to call BS and then I’ve lost credibility with my readers.
Find your voice
We’ve all been told: voice, voice, voice. Publishers want authors with a distinctive voice. But how do you get there? You guessed it: self-editing.
My first drafts are alarmingly pedestrian. The jokes and character quirks don’t really emerge until subsequent drafts, as I find my voice in the particular story and find the characters’ voices.
Conversely, there is such a thing as too much voice. I’ve read some books where the author’s attempt to be funny or quirky was so over-the-top it got in the way of the story. I’m currently pondering whether to DNF a book because the voicey-ness is too cute by half and I’m slightly annoyed just a few pages in.
Editing your own work and really reading what you wrote gives you the opportunity to ask yourself if you’re relying too much on the voice. In one book I recently read, the plot had me turning the pages and I really liked the author’s voice. But then they added the voicey element to every other sentence and it wore me out.
Voice is like fudge. A moderate helping makes your story yummy, but too much will give you a tummy ache.
Use the effing spell check
If you can’t do anything else, at least run your manuscript through spellcheck, for the love of god.
Find the helpers: betas, writing groups, workshops
Some of you may be saying, But my mother wasn’t a copyeditor and no one in my family was an English teacher, so I can’t edit myself.
Luckily, there are lots of helpers. Even with my editorial upbringing, I needed a lot of help when I was starting out. I found that help in writer’s conferences, craft workshops, feedback from beta readers, and from other writers. I still need a lot of help. I’m very lucky to have published authors and my agent in my reader pool and they give me feedback that is, mwah, chef’s kiss — invaluable.
One of the best things I did was attend workshops where writers, agents, or editors gave feedback on first pages. In one workshop where I’d submitted pages, not only did I get valuable feedback on my work, but I got to hear the other critiques and compare what other writers were doing with my work.
I’ve also had writer’s groups and critique partners and gotten a lot out of both. Find your writing tribe. They’ll help you get where you want to go.
When to use a professional editor — and you should
I think self-editing is a necessary first step, but it’s not the end of your editing journey. One of my colleagues, with whom I collaborate on editing projects, told me, “You need a proofreader.” I can go over a manuscript a hundred times and still miss a typo.
Use professional editors of all levels to help you in your writing journey. If you can self-edit before you bring in a pro, you’ll get higher-level feedback and you might save some money. Plus, you’ll be on your way to becoming a better writer.
A final note: There might be some typos or awkward sentences in this very long article. Yep, I did almost no self-editing (I did run spellcheck; I’m not a monster). This is me, trying to be less perfectionist. I’ll save the self-editing for my fiction.
Speaking of fiction, I’ve been very behind in writing this newsletter because I’ve been neck-deep in my novella, Resa Drops a Stitch. I hope to have it out by the end of May, but I’m nervous even writing that down because I’ve blown through a lot of self-imposed deadlines. I’m self-editing now and it’s going slowly but it’s going. I hope to have ARCs soon; subscribers to my newsletter get automatic ARC access, so please subscribe if you’d like to be an advance reader/reviewer.