Editing

Editing can be a long and arduous process. It can drive you crazy and take up a lot of your time. But there are some things you can do to make it a bit easier on yourself.

Firstly, when it comes to editing, it’s much easier to work from a paper copy. Always print out your work and scribble annotations all over it. It’s a simple piece of advice but it’s an important one. When you’re reading off of a hard copy you’re more likely to notice mistakes than when you’re reading it off the screen you wrote it on.

Secondly, read it out loud. Some sentences might sound fine in your head but when you read them out loud you realise it just doesn’t work. And vice versa. Sometimes a sentence doesn’t look right until you read it out loud and it sounds beautiful.

Another method I’ve been told can be useful is reading through your story and highlighting all spelling and grammatical errors without changing them. That way, on a day when you’re not feeling very creative, you can go through and correct all of the technical errors and you’re still being productive without having to be creative.

Lastly, and most importantly, give yourself a break. And I don’t just mean a fifteen minute break after an hour of work. I mean, every now and then, close down your laptop and don’t look at your story for a few days at least. Sometimes you can read something so many times that the words will lose all meaning and you won’t know whether what you’re writing is good or bad. And you’ll start to know your story so well that when you do read it through, you’re not really reading it, you’re reciting what you remember writing. Sometimes you need to step back and give yourself some perspective.

Another great way to gain some perspective is to ask people to proof read your work. Having someone tell you that your story is really good is just as helpful as having them point out problems. When you’ve been working on one story or poem for a really long time, it’s easy to lose heart and convince yourself that what you’re writing isn’t good enough. But if you ask someone to proof read for you, they can point out things – good and bad – that you may never have noticed yourself and it gives you a whole new angle to work from.

So that’s my advice for this week. If any of you have any good editing tips please post them below.

Thanks for reading.