Tips Corner

The Art Of Self-Editing

You've finished writing your story, which means time to jump in joy and dance around. But once the excitement wears off, you sit and question yourself.

What now?

Is it enough? Or there's more to do?

Think. Think. Think.

Well, yes. The next step is to edit your work. You can either hire an editor, but if you have no money to spend, then self-editing it is.

Sounds tough?

It's not.

Before diving further into it, let me know what you prefer. Writing or editing? Do you feel excited to go back to a story to edit it, or you dread the thought of it?

For me, it's the latter. In simple words, editing sucks. I can come up with new stories back to back, but if you tell me to edit my work, I'll be running for the hills. No kidding.

Editing is time-consuming. It requires a lot of things to be done. Even then, it's highly possible to neglect some aspects, unless you have hawk-eyes, of course. So, it's not something that can be done at one go. You'll need to keep coming back until your story is the epitome of perfectionism.

What exactly is editing?

It's rectifying errors like capitalization, punctuation and spelling. Furthermore, it's the process of refining certain parts such as sentence structure, chapter structure, word selection and so on.

★Sentence structure should be such that the paragraphs flow like liquid. Easily. Smoothly. Similarly, the chapter structure shouldn't be chaotic. It should develop in a particular order so that readers can make sense of the various events. Overall, the story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.

★Cut down unnecessary details. It's alright to have a few filler scenes but too many? Unacceptable! Readers will feel like the story is being dragged for no reason when it should have ended already. What you can do is add details that are important for beginners to understand your story. If your story revolves around a character having a medical condition not many are aware of. If you're writing a story involving supernatural creatures, let's say werewolf.

★Don't repeat the words in the same chapter. Try to have variation when using verbs, adverbs, adjectives. This doesn't mean you have to select fancy/complex words. It's likely many won't understand and will need to keep a dictionary with them, thereby ruining their reading mood. It will turn them away from your works. In addition, phrasing also plays an important role. Avoid repetitive phrases, especially in dialogues because we want each character to have distinct voices.

★You can take help of tools like ProWritingAid, Hemingway, Grammarly. Or maybe ask a friend with whom you're comfortable to share your work. Sometimes it so happens that others can detect errors we couldn't while editing.

★Read as a reader. Edit as a writer. Basically, try to be unpredictable. If you think as a reader, you know what they expect next in the chapter. Hence, change the direction to keep the readers intrigued. But don't do this frequently. It's also good to be predictable at times just so readers can yell, "I knew it!".

For those like me who don't think editing is fun, you can try the following to keep yourself motivated.

★Don't edit as soon as you finish writing. Take a break. Distance yourself from it. Read a book by another author or start a new story so that later when you edit you're looking at your work with a fresh pair of eyes. This way you won't feel like you're having to work on the same story for years.

★Don't worry about the length of the book. If you look at it as editing 60,000-70,000 words, you'll lose interest quickly. Edit one chapter at a time. If that too feels a lot, take it one paragraph at a time.

★Self- editing enables us to recognise our mistakes. When publishing the first draft, we hardly think twice about what we've written, so going to edit it means, we know where we went wrong and most likely we'll stop ourselves from repeating them in our future works.

So, let's go ahead and edit our works!

Best of luck everyone! ❤

__Dolly