Self-Editing: Personal Experience

Photo by Benoît Deschasaux. Unsplash

June has been a shockingly productive month for me writing-wise. I set myself the goal of getting all of my rewrites for Part 1 finished so that by the end of the month I could send it to two people who agreed to be beta readers for me. I was a little skeptical I’d be able to actually reach that goal but with 2 days left in the month I’ve managed it!

Real Life Experience

It’s one thing to give advice on self-editing, another to take it. That’s the interesting thing of trying to write a book as an editor. I get to experience things from the other side of the keyboard. What was it like?

1. Take a break. I admit, I took my ‘break’ by working on Part 2 of the book. Granted, the two parts are very different in terms of what I was doing, so I think it still counts as a break. I wasn’t looking at the same words over and over again. And I felt like I was making progress, so I felt good about it.

2. Print it out. I can’t say I felt great for my printer or trees in general printing almost 60 pages at once. I almost never print anything anymore if I can help it, so that part hurt a little. But I really liked taking a pen to the paper and writing notes on it. There’s something very satisfying about that. And I did find it easier to read than the computer.

3. Edit in stages. Since my book is nonfiction I didn’t do stages the same way as I recommend in step 3 for fiction self-editing. I just made sure to take breaks and space out the work to keep my brain fresh. It took longer this way, but did let me feel like I was coming to it each day not tired and already bored with the work.

4. Read it out loud. Reading out loud to yourself is awkward. It feels weird. I was very self conscious about it and I was alone in my office the whole time, so the awkward feeling made no logical sense. I found myself starting by almost whispering under my breath (which had me talking faster) and having to purposely slow down and enunciate and focus on what I was saying. Doing this did let me hear where I was flipping between past and present tenses much easier than just reading in my head though. So it was worth feeling awkward.

5. Be honest with yourself. Take notes while you edit. Steps 5 and 6 I found interesting because they fell into me questioning things, but not necessarily having the answers. Was I giving too many examples of certain types of crimes and it was slowing the pace, or were they interesting enough to keep? Was the explanation for one crime something that made sense to anyone besides me? What about how I had things arranged? I found myself putting comments in the margins to highlight my concerns to my beta readers and get their opinions. I’m at the point in my writing where I’m too close to it to be objective about some things, which means it’s time for outside opinions.

Now comes the thrilling and terrifying part: sending it out to others to read. Will it turn out the whole thing needs to be scrapped and started over? Do I have anything worth starting with? Fortunately I have Part 2 to wrestle with to keep me from worrying about it too much and a goal of trying to have it done by the end of July. Not sure that’s completely realistic, but we’ll find out!

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