hey kids, editing is fun!

Sorry for the Taylor Swift reference in the title. If you know me in person, you know this is inevitable.

A lot of authors hate editing. It involves tearing out chunks of your beloved story, reviewing your own work with a critical eye and figuring out everything you did wrong, and tons of red ink from your critique partners.

It’s brutal! It shatters the illusion that your work is wonderful.

And I get that! I do. But I also love the chance to reread my work, even if the main thing I’m doing is noting everything wrong with it. Editing can be fun!

Early edits

It’s so fun to experience my story at a quicker pace–when writing, it comes so slowly that I become disconnected from the pacing. The whole time, I’m wondering if it’s entertaining, if I’m skipping things, if it’s working at all. When I return to a project and get to read it, I can enjoy the story for what it is.

Beyond that, though, I have so much fun rewriting. I love editing other people’s work, marking it up with suggestions and commenting where I’m confused or bored, but I’m always worried that I’m being too harsh, or that I’m missing the point they’re trying to make.

When I do the same thing to my own projects, I’m free. It’s invigorating to be able to strike out anything I like and replace any word I want! It’s so fun to be harsh with myself! No one else has to see the comments I make. I don’t have to worry about anyone’s feelings. Maybe it’s weird to take joy in cutting out thousands of words and leaving snarky comments for myself, but I do.

Critiques

Of course, self-edits aren’t the only kind.

It’s not quite as fun to get a massive edit letter or your full manuscript covered in line edits. In fact, it’s super intimidating! Still, somehow I’ve managed to find the joy in this, too. The first insight that lets me appreciate it is the knowledge that hundreds of comments and suggestions indicate that someone cares. Someone read my work and paid close attention to it. They caught typos, sure, but more than that, they thought about what each scene and chapter was accomplishing. They worked closely with it. The fact that they’re sending me so much criticism now just means that they want my writing to be better!

Writer’s group

It can be tricky to balance feedback from multiple people.

Working in a writer’s group with about a dozen people has really exercised this for me. Each month, we go over about sixty pages of someone’s work, and though there’s often some consensus about what needs to change, our opinions are by no means consistent. I find myself out of step with other people all the time! I don’t think this means my opinions or theirs are wrong; it just means we like different things. Since I know how they critiqued other people’s writing, when I get a critique from them, I know how to interpret it.

At this stage, we’re mostly fixing pacing, character arcs, and plot resolution. This is when I make sure the story starts and stops where it should, and that each chapter makes sense in the order in which it appears. I’m usually prompted to add descriptions of characters and cut scenes describing their thoughts, because I forget that other people want to know what my characters look like and get bored by many paragraphs of meditation.

When this feedback arrives, it can be overwhelming–I have multiple perspectives on what my project needs, and they’re hard to reconcile! But it’s so fulfilling and fun to dig in, seeking out the commonalities and deciding who to listen to. By the end of this round of edits, my stories are inevitably far stronger and more interesting than I could have imagined.

But still I’m not done!

Publishers

Getting feedback from multiple editors who you’ve never worked with before is much harder. By the time I’m working with professional editors, my project has already been through a round of critiques with my writing group and been accepted by a publisher. I know it’s pretty good! And I know the publisher thought so too! They did accept my manuscript, after all.

So these later edits can be scarier. Do I even have time to fix the things they’re pointing out? Do they secretly hate me?

I know that I do have time, though, and that they don’t hate me. No book is ever going to be perfect. Editing isn’t just about catching typos, but that is a big part of it–it accounts for a huge chunk of the red ink. Clarifying weird sentences, moving scenes around, balancing chapter lengths…these are all similar things that happen at a late stage, once the plot and character arcs already work.

This can be tedious. This is less fun. Ideally, though, when it’s over, I can read my manuscript effortlessly. Everything flows. Everything’s clear. It’s beautiful.

Copy editing

Then, I hope that copyeditors don’t find too many lingering instances of “phase” instead of “faze” or extra spaces between words. Or rather, I hope that if these mistakes exist, they do find them, but I hope that they don’t exist!

At the end of it all, I will have read over my entire manuscript far too many times. I never want to see it again.

But I’m confident that when other people see it, they’ll be seeing the best work I can produce.