Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos
Now I’ll put my hands up and admit to being biased about editing. Well, I am an editor so I would be. But my experience wearing a writer’s and editor’s hat (and sometimes both together) is there is no middle ground here. People love it or hate it.
Before becoming an editor, when I found my acceptances were increasing when I put in decent editing work on my own stories, that changed my attitude too. I thought I’d share some thoughts on editing here which I’ve found helpful with my writing. (A lot of them can apply to when I’m editing someone else too).
Top Tips for Editing Anything
Give yourself plenty of time. Editing always does take longer than you think. I write a piece, rest it, then re-read it and start editing. After the first edit I rest it again. Meantime I’m drafting something else. The trick here is to come back to the piece as if you’ve never seen it before.
Think about the type of editing you are doing. Are you looking for typos, grammatical errors etc at this stage or are you focusing on ensuring the story makes sense, there are no plot holes etc? I find it useful to do the latter first, then worry about the former.
Mix up how you edit. For my shorter pieces, I will sometimes record them on Zoom and play them back. If you set up a meeting with yourself on Zoom, it will convert your file, once you’ve ended that meeting, into an mp3 (audio)/mp4 (video) file. Listening to a story can be amazing for showing up what you’ve left out! Equally you can hear how well or otherwise your dialogue works. Incidentally, I don’t do this all of the time but just every so often to ensure I am not missing anything. And mixing up how you edit is a good way to keep you on your editorial toes!
If you write on screen and edit on screen, when it comes to the latter, it would pay to put your document into a different font, font size, and even colour so the document looks new to you. It will make it easier to spot something amiss. For shorter works, I still prefer to print a document out. There is something about seeing writing on paper which makes errors stand out more. Whether it is a case of seeing something in a different format (paper rather than screen) which does this, I don’t know but I do know this to be true.
Always have more than one editing sweep. You pick up on different things with each one. The publisher I edit for has a three stage process and I apply this to my own work, as well as when I freelance elsewhere. One edit looks at the structure and asks does the story work? Another stage looks at spelling and grammar. The third one checks everything. It is a useful structure for ensuring you have covered everything when editing your work.
It can be useful to ask yourself questions about your work. For example, you know what you want your story to do and what your character wants to achieve so simply ask yourself has the story/character done this by the time you’ve got to those wonderful words The End. It’s a good check.
Another useful question to ask relates to dialogue. Is the dialogue appropriate for your character given who they are, their status, the place where they are, their educational level and so on.
If you use slang, check you have only used it sparingly (otherwise it can come across as gimmicky and that can be a turn-off). Also again is it apt for your character? Could it be part of a catchphrase for them?
Never rely wholly on artificial spell checkers. See them as a useful guide only. Why? Simply because they cannot pick up on context so can let a perfectly spelled word “go through” when it is the wrong word for what you want to say.
Sometimes, for a laugh (really!), I have a look at some of those small video clips you get on Facebook etc where they have clearly used AI to provide the captions. I tend to do this as a wind down after a big writing session. It is amazing what errors these things come up with, not least of which is being unable to get to grips with accents so some strange word combinations come out.
In many ways, I am pleased about this. It means human editors like me are still needed. But do check some of these captioned clips out and you will soon see what I mean.
Do have a good dictionary to hand. We all need one. I use The Oxford Compact Dictionary and Thesaurus.
It pays to be aware of what words you struggle with spelling. We all have them. For example, I know I have to double check manoeuvre (especially as my Scrivener program highlights this as an error, which it isn’t. This is another reason to have the dictionary to hand). Also bear in mind your word processor program may well be set to American spellings so look out for the single letter spellings when we use double etc and if you can change the setting to British spelling, even better.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter what you write, good editing will improve it. I’ve found seeing getting the draft down and, later, editing the same as two separate and different creative tasks. The time away from the “white heat” of creating a new story or article to having a “cool brain” to objectively figure out what is working and what needs improving is important. I do need to come out of the creative zone for a bit before looking at a story or article afresh.
I like to try to come to a piece and look at it as if I hadn’t written it. I ask myself what is in this for the readers? Could anything confuse or, more simply, just be expressed better?
A comfort from all of this is that unless I had written something down, I’ve got nothing to edit. So for me to keep the two writing processes separate makes sense. The editing process can and does help you find ways of improving on what you initially wrote but you needed that trigger to have something to think about at all. You can’t improve something absent after all.
Happy writing and, after a suitable time gap, happy editing!
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
Never miss out on another blog post. Subscribe here:
Leave a Reply