Mr. Titmouse. i beseech you for advice and/or homework. How does one edit oneβs drafts? Up to this point, Iβve only written short prose/poetry, usually stuff I brainstorm, write, and edit within a day or two. however, I recently finished my first-ever novel(la?)-length draft that Iβd written over the course of an entire year (please clap). unfortunately, a lot of the skills I developed to manage the marathon-not-a-sprint of longer-form writing (e.g. 1 sentence/day minimum, writing on my phone, writing in the wee hours before I sleep) donβt seem to apply to editing. the writer brain that could persist on one new sentence a day at minimum, write in smaller chunks on my phone, and fire on all cylinders after midnight, looks at the tens of thousands of words I have to edit for clarity/conciseness/cohesion and completely crashes :β) any insight into editing skills would be immensely appreciated (γ Β΄ Λ `) <3 bonus, since I know you have an Editorβ’: how is you-the-writer editing and third-party-professional editing different? any similarities? (lastly: love your work - from NS to HB to OoA and beyond, itβs rewired my brain in more ways than one & I couldnβt thank you enough)
hmmm. well, unfortunately editing does require you to slow tf down compared to the blitz of Just Do It that is writing. you really can't edit at a rate of one sentence a day, and you Really Really shouldn't be doing it in bed after midnight because you're going to be exhausted and stupid and not notice obvious things. and even i, the guy who has written hundreds of thousands of words on his phone, would not recommend editing on a phone until you're at the part where it's rewriting entire passages.
so here are my tips for you. i can't really give you homework but these are things you should try.
don't try to reread it for at least a week, maybe even two. you have to forget what you wrote a little bit so when you come back to it you'll notice things your eyes slid over, and have an experience closer to what a new reader has.
reread your work at a computer or else a different screen than what you originally wrote on. again, we want it to feel different than what we got used to.
similarly, change the font of the entire thing to, again, make it look different than what you got used to. you want to read the book as if you never read it before, because that's the experience everyone who isn't you will have. think about the piece the way they would.
take notes for yourself, rather than try to make all the edits as they come to you. if you run into a bit where you're like 'this description is kind of flat' you can just highlight it and go back to it later to keep the momentum up. or if there's dialogue you don't like but you don't know exactly how to fix it yet, again, just highlight it and move on. and then when you've finished reading the whole thing you'll have an idea of how much you actually need to do, and then it becomes doing the homework.
of course these are tips best used for copy editing. if you're worrying about your big picture ideas and concepts and the terrifying Cascade Edit (as in, one change in the beginning cascades into bigger changes later), you're going to want to get somebody else to read it and give you feedback. i don't have a ton of advice for that other than 'have friends' or 'pay somebody'.
and re: the experience of having an editor vs doing it myself, honestly, i much prefer having an editor to doing edits myself. because i indulge myself as i might indulge a child who i know has done wrong but can't bring myself to punish. it's much harder to convince myself to do the labor of major changes, even if i know they're necessary, until i've been told exactly why they're necessary and how i ought to do them. in an ideal world when you see a problem in your own writing you'd know exactly how to fix it but alas, if that was the case you wouldn't cause the problem in the first place.
and once i've been told what needs to be done and where i ought to be doing it, then it's just Writing again and not so much Editing. that's just fulfilling a prompt, it's doing the homework. i like that part. it's challenging, but it's still usually easier than the purely generative part of writing.
i hope that's helpful at all
EDIT: i posed the question to my editor @mortalityplays himself to see if he had anything to add, so here's his suggestions.
"as someone who self-edits all my own writing, it takes a lot of practise and you have to learn to understand what your gut is telling you. Analysing other people's work (inside your own head unless solicited lol) is the best way to build that experience.
READ IT OUT LOUD TO YOURSELF!!!!! It will feel stupid at first and you might need to mumble under your breath in an empty room if you have housemates. But the speech part of your brain processes language differently from the reading/writing parts and it will help you A) notice things you were skimming over (like you described) but also B) pay attention to rhythm, pacing and cadence in a way that is much harder to do on the page.
Agree 100% with giving it a week minimum before you read it again. It can also help to imagine someone else you know reading it with you. Which lines do you think they'd laugh at? Which passages might they find confusing or boring? Would you be excited for them to get to a particular part? It's another way of externalising the process, trying to see your work through someone else's eyes.
Read the whole thing from beginning to end without fixing more than typos or single line rewrites. Then go for a walk or do something with your hands and digest it without looking at the words on the page. You will save yourself so much time by figuring out if there are big picture plot, character or structural problems before you try to tackle granular edits. There's nothing more annoying than obsessing for three days over a scene transition that doesn't feel right only to realise the answer is just to swap the order of the scenes around. Work from big to small.
If in doubt, go with whatever reinforces the point of the story.
Be okay with the fact it will read like something you wrote. At some point you have to be the one who decides when it's 'good enough', and that takes a bit of bravery when you don't have an external figure nodding or shaking their head."
