6 Tips to Self-Editing with Confidence

Before finding a developmental editor (or any other editor) for your book, you want to do some editing of your own. There’s a few reasons for this. The most obvious is that we all want to feel as confident as possible when someone else reads our work. Whether the editor you hire is someone you’ve worked with before or a complete stranger, having our work read by anyone for the first time is nerve-wracking. Knowing we’re giving them something that is as good as we could make it before asking for their professional feedback should make us feel a little more confident. Plus, often editors will charge more for a manuscript that is in need of serious work- after all, they are going to be spending a lot of time fixing our grammar, punctuation, and other basic errors that we didn’t take the time to catch. They should charge for it! So why not catch what we can on our own?

Here are a few steps I suggest to help you self-edit your manuscript with confidence before sending it off to a professional.

1. Take a break. Congratulations! You’ve finished a draft of your book! You know it needs work and it isn’t ready to sell yet, but you’ve still done a big thing. Now it’s time to take a deep breath and put it on pause. Turn off the computer. Walk away from your desk. Depending on the kind of deadline you may have, you may not be able to give yourself a huge break, but a rest is in order. Why? Your brain needs to recharge. You need a break from your story. Whether you can give yourself a day or a week, you’ll come back to it with new enthusiasm and a fresh angle, which means you’ll catch some of the details you need to work on in your edit.

   
   

2. Print it out. You may not love hearing this, especially if you wrote something huge. In that case, maybe print out sections at a time, to give both you and your printer a breather. Weird but true fact: we read and see things differently on a printed page than on a computer screen. That means we will catch mistakes on the page that we miss on the screen. There’s also something deeply satisfying about writing notes to yourself in the margins that I find can get creativity flowing. It’s also the perfect time to pull out those fabulous colored pens you’ve been hoarding.

   
   

3. Edit in stages. Don’t try to do everything at once! You’ll overwhelm yourself, and definitely not catch everything. Remember how many types of editors there are? Try the same approach: Do a pass looking for plot holes and character arc problems, another focusing on dialog. One pass just looking at your grammar or punctuation. Of course if something leaps out at you, mark it when you see it -because you’ll never find it again on its designated pass. And again, if you can, give yourself breaks in between passes so you don’t burn yourself out.

   
   

4. Read it out loud. You’ve probably seen this advice before and rolled your eyes. And yes, it feels a little weird sitting in a room talking to yourself. If it helps, commandeer your pet and read out loud to them for as long as they’ll put up with you. When we’re reading to ourselves (in our heads), our brains automatically make corrections as we go. Especially if we’re reading something we wrote and know what it’s supposed to say. When we read out loud, we have to slow down. So our brains don’t get to make those automatic corrections and we catch more of our little mistakes. It could be something as easy as having skipped a word in a sentence, used a word that doesn’t work, or left out a sentence that would make the meaning of something much clearer. Try it. You’ll get over the awkwardness when you see how well it actually works. Or have the computer read it to you- there are all kinds of programs for that now!

   
   

5. Be honest with yourself. You’ve celebrated your success in coming this far, now it’s back to work. And at this stage of the job comes the part where you’re brutally honest with yourself. You had a lot of ideas in Draft 1. Now is the time to look back on them critically. Did they all work? Look at your book as if you were a reader. Do all of the characters stand out as individuals or can some of them be cut or blended together? Do you need all of the scenes as they are? Should some move forward or back in time? Should some be cut to make the plot more focused?

   
   

6. Take notes while you edit. If you start moving scenes and cutting characters like we talked about in step 5 without taking notes, you’ll drive yourself crazy! Keep a spreadsheet, handwritten notes, whatever you find works for you- but track them somehow! You don’t want to move chapter 3 to chapter 8 and then remember that your character learns something really vital in chapter 3-that you didn’t change in your timeline. Or you cut a character but his name still shows up randomly in chapter 15.

   
   

Self-editing takes a lot of time if you do it well. And it takes a lot of practice to do it well. But it is absolutely worth it. Don’t be afraid to change things up in your draft, everything from getting rid of unnecessary words to scenes or characters. Never completely delete scenes. Have a folder for cut scenes or chapters. If nothing else, you can use them as extras for newsletters when you decide to start doing newsletters. Remember, this is about you growing and experimenting as a writer.  You’re not failing at writing because you need to work at it. This is a craft we all work at all the time. Nobody writes a perfect book the first time they sit down at the desk. And when you’ve taken your drafts as far as you can, reach out to others- other readers, and editors to see what suggestions they can offer that will help you take your book to the next level. You have it in you. Sometimes we just get too overwhelmed by other things to see it ourselves and need to let someone else show us what we have.

Are you looking for a writing coach, marketing coach, or developmental editor?

Contact me and let’s talk about your project!