Editing: Your New Best Friend

Hello all!

Sorry I haven't had much to say since last post, but I had to take care of some finals midway through the month, and I also prescribed myself some serious relaxation time with the family. Gotta love Christmas and the holiday season in general!!

So in light of all the essays I had to write (one of them was twenty pages, holy heck) and the after-Nano November writing I've fleshed out, I stumbled on some advice for every writer's problem: How do you properly edit your own writing?

I know you've all thought about this, especially those of you writing essays and get them back with lots of grammatical issues circled that you should've caught. I know I certainly have, because when I am ready to start sending out my work to other publishing companies, I don't want them to think I submitted a retarded first draft!

I stumbled upon a LinkedIn group chat about the subject, and one girl in particular offered some great advice.

1. For one thing, try to at least ask someone else to read it over. Having someone else willingly and intelligently read your work is priceless! Ask them to look for specific problems other critics have noticed in your work. Are you a comma splice queen like me? Do you confuse tenses of your verbs? Are you worried about the flow of the piece overall? If they're really nice or efficient, they will definitely bring up enough issues for you to tackle. The more, the better, right? TAKE THEIR ADVICE. Especially if you hire a professional. They know the rules enough that your work will look and sound professional. 

2. When you're writing, leave it alone for the day and then go to edit it. If you finished a chapter, look at it a day later and you will be able to find inconsistencies that you wouldn't have found earlier. Maybe the pace is off, or the dialog needs to go in another direction. Maybe there's a better way to make your point in an essay. Make the changes, or leave notes for yourself in track changes for bigger issues that you want to get to later (HALLELUJAH AMEN THANK YOU to whoever invented track changes in MS Word).

3. When editing, don't try to polish everything at once. That means, read through your work look JUST for grammatical issues, sentence-by-sentence and ignore everything else. Then go through for spelling. THEN, read through paragraph-by-paragraph to ensure that everything is flowing well. Sometimes we tend to ramble and we want to check that what's there on the page is necessary, especially for essays! At this point, you might want to move paragraphs around and double-check topic sentences of each paragraph to ensure they match the rest of the paragraph. If you are writing a novel, make sure that loose-ends are tied!

4. If you're editing your own writing, read backwards. You heard me. You've probably read it over five times and you think you can't find anything else that could possibly be considered a mistake. Take a complete section of your writing, like a chapter or sub-topic and start from the last sentence. Read just that sentence and look for all those grammatical issues you know you have trouble with. One it's improved, move to the second-to-last sentence and repeat until you're done with the section. You're not looking for the big idea here, just issues on a sentence level. Your writing will look different this way and you won't be able to gloss over things.

Anyway, hopefully these points help. You probably won't catch every tiny little thing, but if you're serious about good, quality writing, you'll produce the best writing you possibly can. Consider these points depending on your project and their deadlines.

Good luck with your 2014 projects! It's a new year to reach those writing goals! 

Recovery

word count: 50,285
page count: 85

Oh my gosh, that's a true statement all right! Yup, I managed to succeed in this year's NaNoWriMo challenge. I apologize for those of you who were wondering where the heck I disappeared off to once November drew to a close. As some of you know, it's already a bit stressful trying to write a novel's first draft during the busiest month of the college semester. Sooo, once November ended, I picked up the pace to keep up with my studies.

But here's the story:

Over the entire month of November, I ended each day questioning myself, "Why are you doing this, anyway? The book won't be done, anyway, plus you have so many other things that deserve your attention. What's the point?" I'm glad I didn't give in, even though there were days where the words didn't come and I wasn't focused on the plot or characters at all. But on the last day of November, I found myself sliding across the finishing line! For those reasonably skeptical folks out there, you're probably like, "So how do they even know that you wrote all those words anyway?" Well, they have a word counter thing and to validate your manuscript, you copy & paste your work and their word count is apparently different from the word count used in Microsoft Word, because they thought I was 100 words or so behind! That didn't stop me, so on the last day, I wrote almost 300 extra words so that I could satisfy the word count. And it felt great! My brainchild and I survived!

 So what's next you ask? Well, even though I won the challenge, I probably won't use any of the "winnings"—that being all the various resources where I can self-publish my novel in e-book format. I don't want to give out a first draft of ANYTHING I write, and the novel itself still isn't done, believe it or not. I have this great relationship between two characters that spans over a few years and I want to make it seem real rather than a "So we just met, wanna get together?" type of thing.

 It's not the end of the world; I won in many ways, because I have a new novel which I didn't have a month ago, and I pretty much proved to myself that any excuses I make up about not having enough time to read or write for pleasure are just bogus. So I hope to be able to still right every day—maybe not the same intensity—but I'll get somewhere with this project and my other project that has taken me years to get about 300 pages fleshed out.

 If anything, take my advice when I say: if you have a goal or a hobby, if it's that important to you, than it deserves your time and efforts. I always think "Oh, I'll have time to write over the summer or during the holidays" but I don't get as much done as I hoped I would and I always think that I'm too busy or stressed to write during school. Everyone has their own way of prioritizing their lives and how they use their precious time, but if you have a goal, it's important enough. That means not always listening to others who think that you should spend more time with studies or work or something. It's not like I didn't go to classes or finish my school work for the sake of this novel—ugh, my parents would kill me—but I made sure I had two solid hours each day to write and I found ways to get everything done. It just happens; you get smarter about your planning and prioritizing and everything falls into place.

 So if you're a writer and time doesn't seem to be on your side—try to make it work, anyway. You really get better at it every day, and taking time to think about your project and what you want to say is really beneficial.

 So write on, people, write on.