Revise Later

The Problem

It is very difficult to edit your own writing. The hardest and most time-consuming way to edit your own work is at the moment of writing it. This stifles your creativity, slows your writing down to a crawl, and will inevitably discourage you from further writing.

The Forces Involved

The process of editing and revising a text primarily engages the problem-solving abilities of your creative mind, a very different mode of thought from the alternating mixture of creative invention and problem-solving that goes into writing.

When reviewing a piece of writing, every writer is his own worst critic and a poor judge of his own work. Many writers oscillate between foolish overconfidence and withering self-deprecation.

You can’t evaluate your writing when the invention is fresh and recent, with the ideas still percolating in your mind. You frequently can’t even read the text you have just written without substituting the text in your head: garbled phrasing will read as correct and typos will pass unnoticed as your mind fills in the missing context for you.

Later, when the heat and glow of invention have subsided, you may see only the problems and the deficiencies in a piece, without being able to recognize the raw value that hides latent within the unrevised text.

Therefore:

The Solution

First, you must wait to edit and revise. Just Write, and do not edit your words as you write them. Revision should be a separate process from production.

To avoid writer’s blindness, wait at least a day before revising a text: long enough for the idea to fade a bit from your mind. Longer may be better, depending on your skill level, experience, and personal tendency to overconfidence. Work on something else while you wait. (100:10:1)

Recognize that writing is a process. Do not expect perfect prose from yourself in a rough draft, or even your first revised draft. Instead, look at every revision as an opportunity to make the text better.

Separate out the processes of editing and revision. Editing is the process of identifying problems in the text. Revision is the process of applying edits through correction and rewriting.

To self-edit, print the text out double-spaced with a generous margin and mark it up with a red pen. (This could also be done to a PDF with a tablet and stylus.)

It may help to read passages aloud to yourself. If you stumble over anything, your reader is likely to as well. If it sounds odd or awkward to your ear, it probably is.

Work in passes. Have you ever pawed through a pile of LEGO looking for just that one piece? If you try to look for three shapes of three different colors, you won’t find anything. But if you look for one shape or one color, you’re sure to find it quickly. The same principle applies to editing. On each pass through the text, be on the lookout for a different kind of problem. At some point you may also wish to engage a professional editor for any or all of these:

  1. Developmental edit: focused on the big picture items of theme, character, and consistency. Does everything hold together and contribute to a unifying theme?
  2. Structural edit: focused on the overall structure of the story. Does it work? Does it engage the reader? Does everything happen in logical progression? Does every scene move the story forward?
  3. Copy edit: focused on the mechanics of the prose. Look for problems with:
    * Spelling
    * Grammar
    * Capitalization
    * Word usage
    * Dialogue tags
    * Point of view
    * Verb tense
    * Inconsistencies in description (character, setting, action blocking)
  4. Line edit: like a copy edit, but more focused on style, consistency, and flow than on mechanics.
  5. Fact-checking: focused on the facts. Especially if you’ve done research on an unfamiliar subject, you would be wise to find a subject-matter expert to review your manuscript for errors.
  6. Proofreading: comes later in the production process when you have a typeset, ready-for-production file for print or e-book. This is the last chance to catch any typos or formatting mistakes. You should do this yourself, and then if you can, you should pay an eagle-eyed professional proofreader to catch what you missed.

Mark every change twice: once in the text, once in the right margin. This will make it easier to find all your changes when entering them later: just scan down the right margin!

Learn to use standard proofreading marks. (You’ll need to learn these anyway when you begin to work with professionals.)

Once you’ve finished a pass of editing it’s time to revise. Return to your word processor and apply your edits to the text. You can revise the document in place or keep the unrevised version as a backup.

Once you’ve done one or two passes of self-editing and revision, Get an Outside Opinion.

You should revise as many times as the text requires, but you must recognize when to stop. Do not be like T.H. White’s foolish armorer, who sharpened every sword until it was dull. Set a Deadline.

Real artists ship. Always Ship.

Next Steps

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Get an Outside Opinion