Ever finished a book and wondered how the author managed to pull it off? It’s usually because they were working with a great editor. Hiring an editor isn’t like pressing the Easy Button, however. Self-editing your fiction is an invaluable part of the writing process, one that too many aspiring authors are quick to skip over.
Like most students, I rarely edited anything I wrote in high school and community college. I’d give something a quick proofread now and then, but I wasn’t interested in doing an in-depth overhaul of my work. I’d done my very best on my first attempt — or so I thought — and so trying to improve upon it was essentially pointless.
That went for my fiction as well. I fell into the pitfall of editing as I went, which meant that I hardly ever finished a writing project. By the time I learned that editing as you go is a terrible way to write, I felt so overwhelmed that I actually stopped writing for several years because I couldn’t do things the “right” way.
Spoiler alert: there is no “right” way to write fiction. Every author is different. Hell, every book is different.
This is all to say that self-editing can overwhelm anyone who isn’t used to it. In spite of that fact, you should absolutely learn how to do it. Can you self-edit your way onto the bestseller list? Probably not. But it will make you a more competent writer and a better critique partner.
What Is Self-Editing, Anyway?
Self-editing is exactly what it sounds like: editing your own fiction. It isn’t easy, but many authors — myself included — prefer it over drafting.
This post deals with self-editing book-length works, not short fiction. When it comes to short stories and their even shorter cousins, flash fiction and drabbles, the plot plays by different rules. Short-form works have less real estate to work with. The shorter your piece gets, the more value each paragraph, sentence, and word must contribute in order to earn its place.
What Do You Need to Start Self-Editing?
Programs like Grammarly and — shudder — Microsoft Word’s spellcheck feature might be ubiquitous in today’s writing spaces, but they aren’t essential. You only need three things to self-edit:
- A finished manuscript
- Time
- Distance
The first point is pretty obvious. But what do we mean when we talk about time and distance with editing?
Well, for starters, writing and editing are marathons, not sprints. Unless you have copious amounts of cocaine — not recommended — you’ll find it hard to complete an entire writing project in a single night. Similarly, you probably shouldn’t edit your work all in one go, because seeing the same mistakes over and over again is liable to make you grumpy.
But time is also the way you get to our third list item: distance. When you edit something as soon as you’ve finished it, you’re less likely to be able to see the errors present. Your brain knows what you’re trying to say, and it will tell you you’ve said it, regardless of whether it’s true. Self-editing your fiction, then, requires you to be able to look at your manuscript with a fresh set of eyes.
Stephen King recommends a six-week waiting period between drafting and editing. From On Writing:
If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.
There is, of course, a fourth tool that many writers consider indispensable to self-editing, and that’s the Chicago Manual of Style. I don’t recommend writers new to self-editing pick it up, however, because it’s just comprehensive enough to be completely overwhelming.
Why Is It So Important to Learn How to Self-Edit Your Fiction?
Regardless of whether you enjoy editing, you’ve got to learn how to do it. Why? Because it will save you so much time, money, and heartache.
The amount of work a manuscript needs to be publishable directly influences the amount of time an editor will need to spend with the book. Poor writing leads to slow reading and the need for longer and more intensive suggestions. When you’re working with editors who charge by the hour, you’re paying a high premium by choosing not to self-edit your work before submitting it to them.
At the very least, your self-editing pass or passes should catch the mistakes that you can see. An editor will almost certainly find more room for improvement. But it’s hard to tell someone how to fix a plothole when they’ve spelled the main character’s name three different ways in as many pages. The more small-scale errors you can sweep out of their way, the better they can guide you.
What to Tackle First When You’re Self-Editing Fiction
That being said, doing only the bare minimum of self-editing is not the goal. Working with an editor is a collaborative process. The more you know about self-editing, the more competent you are as an editing partner, and the better your outcomes will be.
Here are the three issues you should try to tackle first when self-editing your full-length fiction manuscript.
1. Plotholes
Some people will tell you that you cannot see the plotholes in your own work. To a certain extent, that’s true. Our brains create our reality and resist change. So when you come up with an absurd solution to your protagonist’s relationship woes or make circumstantial evidence key to your amateur sleuth’s case-busting, you might think it’s the greatest thing ever — because your brain tells you so.
That’s why getting distance from your work is so important. Your editing abilities get stronger the more time you give yourself to forget the details of your piece. Don’t go overboard and leave your manuscript in a drawer for years — just a few weeks is fine — but don’t be too hasty to jump into your revisions, either.
What are plotholes?
Plotholes are literally holes in your plot: places where logic fails and a total lack of critical thinking reigns supreme. A lot of famous, beloved stories have plotholes, but don’t count on your reader to let yours slide. There’s only so much disbelief you can ask them to willingly suspend before their goodwill peters out.
So how do you learn to spot plotholes?
Learning how to spot plotholes in your own work takes time. Namely, it takes time away from your draft. If you turn around and edit your manuscript as soon as you type “THE END,” you’ll be unable to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Time and distance make it easier to turn on your editor brain and think critically about your draft.
I recommend doing an entire editing pass just trying to poke holes in the logic of your story. If you have your doubts about the logic behind a section — a solution you came up with, a scenario your characters find themselves in, etc. — after taking some time away from your manuscript, then chances are you’ve got a plothole.
How do you fix plotholes?
Fixing plotholes isn’t an easy process, nor is it one-size-fits-all. There’s no single method I can give you that will fix every plothole you run into. What I can tell you is that a rigid sense of internal logic and critical thinking are critical to paving those plotholes over.
2. Characterization
People aren’t always the most predictable. Sometimes you act out of character. We all do it, but our characters probably shouldn’t — not unless there’s a very good reason for them to. A huge part of good characterization is consistency: making sure your audience can identify your characters by their speaking patterns, body language, personalities. When you’re reading through your manuscript for the first time after getting some distance from it, ask yourself:
- Does my main character have a personality — or are they just along for the ride?
- Are my characters well differentiated — or do they all look, act, think, and speak the same?
- Do my characters act in accordance with their personal psychologies — or are they wildly unpredictable?
- Do my characters have more than one facet to their personalities — or are they flat?
- Do I know what my characters’ motivations are — and are those motivations related to what’s happening in the story?
If the answer to the first parts of any of those questions is no, it’s time for you to go back to the drawing board and get to know your characters a little bit better.
3. Emotional Arc
After you’ve fixed your plotholes and characterization problems, it’s time to work on your story’s emotional arc. This aspect of your story represents your protagonist’s inner transformation over the course of the manuscript. In order to make it satisfying, your audience must believe that your character can change, and they must get to see that change play out on the page.
(Or not. Sometimes characters refuse to change, and that can be a satisfying, if frustrating, emotional arc. This is rare, though, and I don’t really recommend it. It’s much more fun to watch a character grow into themself than it is to watch them be pigheaded.)
In order to build a satisfying emotional arc, you have to give your protagonist — and any other main characters you happen to have — an emotional wound. Yep, you have to traumatize your characters to give your audience a satisfying reading experience. That wound is probably one they’ve carried around since childhood, and it’s tainted their worldview in some way. That worldview is one they fight very hard to keep believing in, until the evidence becomes overwhelming and they’re forced to make a choice: change and begin recovering from their emotional wound, or stay hurt for the rest of their lives.
Most importantly, that emotional wound and the worldview it gives your protagonist must affect how they interact with your story. Decisions they make, which drive the plot forward, should be made with the emotional wound in mind.
To trace your main character’s emotional arc, I recommend making a list of every scene in your story and noting how the emotional wound affects them. How does it get in the way of your character’s goals? How does it complicate their life?
Conclusion
Learning how to self-edit your fiction doesn’t have to be difficult. Once you’ve mastered these three self-editing passes, you’ll be reworking your manuscripts like a pro.
Image credit: Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash