024: 3 Tips for Self-Editing
Self-editing is an important part of the writing process - even if you're planning to hire an editor for your book. In this episode, I share three tips to help you edit your own work.
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3 Tips for Self-Editing
Hello, welcome back to the podcast! Really appreciate you listening. And I appreciate your reviews on Apple podcasts or Spotify. I love it when you share a takeaway or share that you're listening on Instagram and tag me, DMS. Anything it's really, really cool to see, you know, feedback and to let me know what episodes you've liked what's helpful. It's really nice. So thank you, thank you. Um, I did an episode a couple of weeks ago, that was at the end of March. That was about what it's like to work with an editor and it kind of, you know, showed you the process that I use everything that clients go through from going on my website and seeing my services all the way to getting their finished manuscript. And I was thinking, as I was recording that episode, like, huh, I've never really talked about Self Editing much on the podcast, let me do an episode about that. So that's what we're talking about today.
Now, the tips that I'm going to share with you in this episode are things that you can implement whether you are not hiring an editor, if hiring an editor is not financially feasible for you, it's not something you can do. Totally fine, you can absolutely still publish your book. So the tips that we're going to talk about will help you in that process. These tips are also going to help you if you want to work with an editor, if you want to hire someone, it's important to do, it's important for you to do self editing before you hire an editor for a couple of reasons. One, it's just a good learning process, it's important for you as the author, to know how to edit your own work. And let's just get this out right away. Like we cannot be completely objective about our own work. I realize that but there are still ways that you can kind of approach it with fresh eyes, which we'll talk about. So it's important for you to learn that process of editing. That's how you improve as a writer. And it's also important because if you are going to hire with an editor, if you are going to hire an editor, I do this with copy editing, a lot of editors do this where they have a range, their prices are based on the scope of the project based on what state that manuscript is in.
So if I get a manuscript that I see a sample of in a no, it's going to take me a long time to copy edit it because there are a lot of grammatical changes that need to happen a lot of cleanup as far as like verb tense, things, punctuation, just a lot of different things going on, then I have to charge a little bit more, because it's going to take me a long time to do it's going to just going to be more work on my end. Whereas if I get a manuscript that has already I can tell has already been polished, there's not much that's needed, I'm not going to charge that person as much. That wouldn't be fair, right? So for you to go in and do some rounds of self editing, as far as like cleaning up the grammar or cleaning up the story that could potentially save you money in the editing process when you hire someone. And let's not across the board, some editors just charge flat rates, it doesn't matter. And, you know, for something like a manuscript evaluation, I don't charge based on the state of the story. It's just a flat price, depending on how many words you have, but it's just something to keep in mind, especially for things like grammar and punctuation and that kind of stuff.
All right. So my first tip in the self editing process is hard to do. For some writers, I know it's gonna go against your natural instinct, some of you the tip is to let the manuscript sit, do not jump in immediately to make all kinds of changes. It is hard for me to say that I want to dive in immediately and polish because that's what I love to do. Getting the first draft out for me is extremely hard. It is hard for me to get that draft out. And I'm so excited. Once it's done that I get to go back in and edit and polish my own work. Like I can't wait to do it. But I don't do that right away. I recommend letting it sit for at least a couple of weeks. Now if you are self publishing and you're writing a lot of books, you're on a tight turnaround, I understand that might not be possible, but even letting it sit for four or five days is better than nothing. And in those four or five days, those two weeks, those two months, whatever length of time you take, don't think about the book as much as possible. If you're still trying to work out like a plot issue, or something I understand it can be hard to not think about it, you can take, you know, give yourself like a little bit of time to do that. But try to just set it aside completely and not think about it.
This is going to help immensely because when you come back to the manuscript, you're going to come back to it with a slightly more open and kind of refreshed Perspective Perspective. Whereas if you jump in immediately, the second that you finish writing, you go back to page one and start editing. You haven't really had that time to do that. When I come back to my own writing, after I let it sit for a while. I'm always I'm pleasantly surprised by a lot of things. There's some things I'm like, Oh, this is a lot worse than I remembered. I really need to clean up this part or Polish. You know, this thing, that weird thing that I did in the first draft, but a lot of times I'm pleasantly surprised by the story. And I can see things that I had sort of forgotten about I can see things that maybe yeah I agonized over the direction that a character needed to go in, I agonized over how to end a particular scene. And I'll go back and read it and think, oh, that's actually not bad at all. I don't know why I was so stressed about that. So it's interesting what you notice when you come back to it. So that's tip number one, let it sit, don't jump in immediately.
Hey, real quick before we continue with this episode, I want to tell you about my amazing mentoring program to help you write and revise your book in six months without stress or overwhelm. And by the way, yes, you can write and revise your book in six months. Even if you have a full time job. Even if you've never written a book before, even if you don't write every day. This one on one program contains accountability check-ins with me, coaching calls, regular feedback on your pages as you're writing, copy editing and more, head to the link in the description of this episode or www.thekatiewolf.com/blankpagetobook for more info. Okay, back to the show.
Tip number two, when you are in the revision process, when you're ready to start editing, go for the big picture stuff first. This can be like moving scenes around if you need to put chapter 16 earlier in the story. And now it needs to be chapter 10. If you need to change the ending, like completely rewrite the end of the book and add like two more chapters. If you need to do big structural stuff. Do that first, before you go in and edit line by line, you know, or even like paragraph by paragraph. The reason for this is you're saving yourself work, and and time really. If you go in and edit every single line, if you edit the grammar, you add in more layers of complexity, you kind of make the prose a little bit more elevated or changed the flow of the sentences. If you go through the manuscripts and do all of that work, and then get to the end of the book and realize wait a second, I need to completely change the middle of the book. And let's say you have to go in and rewrite three chapters, you wasted all that time polishing those three chapters that are going to have to be scrapped and rewritten. And that can be kind of discouraging, right. So you just want to save yourself time. Just do all the big picture stuff first. This can be also adding in things if you need to add in a subplot, if you need to add in a different character if you need to remove chapters remove a character. That's all the big picture stuff. This goes up by the way, I'll just say this goes against my natural instinct as well. I want to get in and edit sentence by sentence. And I did that with my first book.
When I was self editing that book, and wasted a lot of time because I had to I had to change things. Of course you can do it's not like wrong to do that. It's just if you want to kind of be efficient and not waste time, then it's better to do big picture stuff first. Tip number three is do something to switch the actual format of the document that you edit in. This is going to help it look like a different document. It's going to help it seem new and fresh to your eyes. And this is especially helpful when you do go through and copy edit or line edit and even If you're not familiar with those terms, you're like, what does that mean? I'm just talking about when you're going through word by word, examining a sentence like, oh, did I forget a verb in the sentence? Is this sentence incomplete? Let me fix that. Did I accidentally, you know, jump into a new transition, or jump into a new scene without like a transition sentence. Let me fix that. Did I put a comma instead of a period instead of a period, let me fix that. That kind of stuff, it can really help if you switch the format of the document, there are a few different ways you can do this. My favorite honestly, is just change the font change the font. So it's like very, very different. I've been experimenting with some different fonts. I have written in Garamond before. I write in Microsoft Word. Honestly, just play around. Maybe if you write if you wrote the whole book, in Times New Roman switched to like Comic Sans, or something, I've heard that people who use Comic Sans in the editing process really like it because it's so different. That font is very different from Arial, or Times New Roman, you can also put your screen on night mode so that the document is black, and the words are white, that can help. If you want to have it be like in a PDF, as opposed to a word, whatever you can do to just make it different. You can even put your Microsoft Word if you if you wrote in Word, you can upload it to Google Docs, and look at it that way you can look at your manuscript on your phone as opposed to your computer.
Anything that you can do to change it is going to help. It's almost like a little trick for your brain to make it just seem like it's new and it's fresh. That can really help. Because again, like we've we've spent so much time with our manuscript, so much time, weeks, months, maybe even years with the same document. So it's very easy for us to miss things. It's easy for our eyes to sort of gloss over mistakes, like it really helps to switch these things. So good luck with self editing. Again, it's, it's, it's helpful. It's a helpful skill to have as a writer like yes, we need to know how to write a first draft, but we also need to know how to edit. Even if you have editors that work on every single thing you write, even if you hire someone for all of your books, this is still an important skill for you to have. That's really where the story is shaped, for me at least, in the editing process. So it's a it's an important skill to have. All right, good luck on your revision journey on your editing journey. You've got this. I'll see you next week.