As an editor, I’ve heard a lot of reasons why people don’t need editing. Some even sound totally plausible. Typically, my automatic response is, “Send in a thousand words for editing, and we’ll see.” I’ve signed a lot of clients that way. There are, however, underlying issues at work that make authors hesitant to send in their project - chiefly, either a belief that their work doesn’t need editing, or a fear that their manuscript will be stolen. I'll say this unequivocally: any reasons that exist to bypass editing are faulty. An author needs an editor. Below is a common list of common justifications for not hiring an editor, and my responses to them.

I Self-Edit

One of my early blog posts was about How To Self-Edit. Contrary to popular belief, editors LOVE it when you self-edit. It allows the editor to move past obvious errors and move onto the more important aspects of editing a manuscript, but it is not a reason to deny yourself professional help.

Self-Editing Is Painful

It’s one thing to go over your manuscript looking for glaring errors, but doing a serious edit on your own manuscript is an incredibly painful experience. I know. I did it on my first novel. Somehow, I managed to write every day for six months - but when it came time to edit it, I fell into a bout of depression. It was the most painful experience I ever had writing. Save yourself the agony.

It's Hard To See Your Work For What It Is

Have you ever carefully scoured a school paper looking for errors, only to discover later that you omitted or misspelled obvious words? If you’re like most people, you probably have. When we read our own writing, we often read them the way we meant to write them, NOT the way we wrote them.

I'm Afraid Of Sharing My Work With Someone Else

If you have no aspirations in the realm of book sales, this is a perfectly valid excuse - but if you want to become a bestselling author, this excuse is just silly. The people who buy your book will read it, so why not have it as error-free as possible before they do?

I Could Have My Work Stolen

I know of an author who had a screenplay stolen. She wound up submitting it to dozens of producers, agents and directors, and one of them took the script, re-wrote it, and turned it into a movie. Later, the author wound up recognizing her script at her local movie theatre. She sued the studio, provided proof that they had access to her copyrighted script, and showed that there were too many similarities to allow for simple coincidence. She won, and wound up forcing the studio to pay her royalties, got a highly coveted writing credit and, in the vast publicity from the court case, wound up gathering enough of a following to get several more of her screenplays turned into movies… I’m not saying this is how it ends up for everyone - but there are two morals to this story. Firstly, having a screenplay stolen isn’t always the death blow writers often believe it is. Secondly, the fear of having your work stolen is a perfectly rational fear - but it is far more likely, if your manuscript is poorly edited, that nothing will ever happen to it in the first place.

I Feel Like I'm Giving Up Control

Maybe you are. That really depends on the editor. Whenever possible, try to find an editor who doesn’t ask for any kind of credit whatsoever. Also be sure to find someone who doesn’t make changes directly to your manuscript (this can feel very intrusive, and it makes it hard to see the original way it was written). Having an editor that places their changes in red allows you to easily choose which suggestions you want to follow, and which ones you don’t.

Most importantly, look for an editor who keeps their line of communication open. Too many of the editing services I see online are a one shot deal: you send in your work, and you get it back edited. In my opinion, the field of editing is far too personal for that kind of cold capitalistic approach. A good editor will always be happy to talk with you about the reasoning behind any change they make. Whoever you choose, and whatever their methods, always remember that you have the final say. Ultimately, you are not obligated to change a single word of your manuscript.

Writing Challenge

Send the first 1000 words of your novel in for editing. If I don’t find anything wrong, I will personally transfer you $100. I am one hundred percent serious.

I encourage everyone to self-edit, and that surprised a lot of people. There’s an idea that, if people edit their own work, they won’t actually need an editor… I don’t believe that one bit. Everyone needs a fresh, ideally professional, set of eyes. Sometimes, no matter how much writer’s edit, they see what they think they wrote, not what they actually wrote. Editors don’t. As much as I believe in editors however, even if you have all the money in the world and can afford to go through as many as three editors, I STILL think you should be doing self-editing! If you don’t edit what you can, an editor will probably be able to help you – but why should they? When they’re editing what you could fix yourself, too much of their time is spent on typos, grammatically incorrect sentences and other small issues to pay as much attention to other areas! What’s more, if upon completion you send off an unedited manuscript to publishers, I can pretty much guarantee that they won’t endorse it. When there are thousands of possible clients sending them books that are practically ready to print, why would they take a chance on a project that would require them to spend more time and money to get it prepared? It doesn’t matter how good it is. Now that you see why self-editing can be so important, here are a couple of things that you can do before you send your manuscript off to an editor, agent or publisher.

Switch Passive Voice To Active Voice

This is a really common piece of advice, but it directly applies to immediate fixes you should be making during the editing process. Most examples of the passive voice in writing books are extremely obvious (“The ball was picked up and thrown by Tom” et cetera…), but when most people accidentally touch on the passive voice, it is far less extreme. When you come across sentences like, “They were invited over by their neighbors for Tea,” or “The animal rights group was well-loved among the monkeys they saved,” it can be easy to pass over them without a second thought, but both of these sentences are written in the clunky and unemotional passive voice. The passive voice, simply put, is the style of writing where things happen to your nouns. In the first example, the ball is what I like to call an “artificial subject.” The focus, instead of being on Tom as it would normally be, is on the ball. The passive voice here isn’t necessarily a problem if you actually want the focus to be on the ball. In a story about a magical ball that changes the fortunes of all who touch it, this sentence would be perfectly reasonable… In a typical story though, it’s clunky, and forces attention where it doesn’t belong. The fix is obvious, “Tom picked up and threw the ball.” The second two examples can be fixed by saying “Their neighbors invited them over for tea,” and “The monkeys loved the animal rights group that saved them.” The active voice is more direct and more emotional; this is why scientific papers are purposefully written in the passive voice! If it’s a little more confusing and a little less emotional, it sounds like a much more important discovery.

When Possible, Remove Direct Characterization

“Raul felt angry” or “Jen was the type of person to put the needs of everyone else above her own” are both perfectly reasonable sentences, but they might be examples of narrators overstepping their bounds. If Raul slams his fists on the table, don’t we know he’s angry? If Jen gives up a seat even though her ankle is throbbing, don’t we know that she puts the needs of others above her own? If your characters really do what you say they will, there’s no need to explain it beforehand! I would guess that, when it comes to the philosophy of “Show, don’t tell,” 90% of the violations come from direct characterization. Another issue I have with direct characterization is characterization devoid of examples. If you as the narrator say that Patty is a soft-hearted person who is always thinking of others, but, because she gets so caught up in the craziness of your plot, she never actually gets around to treating anyone with kindness, then your narration will ring false. Your reader will be confused as to why it is there in the first place.

Turn Responsive Characters Into Active Characters

As time goes on, more and more of the books that I edit are “action novels,” written in the vein of the modern television thriller. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever – it’s good to have a highly intricate plot – but when perfecting your pre-editor draft, you should be on the lookout for areas where your character is being dragged along. Here are two scenarios to demonstrate what I’m talking about.

Scenario 1:

Your character is told by his superior to disarm a bomb, and so he does.

Scenario 2:

Your character is told by his superior that there’s not enough time to disarm the bomb, but instead, he disobeys a direct order and puts his life on the line to save the lives of everyone left in the building.

Seeing the scenarios written out like that, it’s probably fairly obvious which one makes for the more powerful scene. Oftentimes, however, authors simply don’t think about ways to put control into the hands of their characters. They think, “Hey, I have pages and pages filled with hot girls, fast cars, huge explosions and tons of emotional drama! What more do I need?!” The answer is character development. In my mind, when it comes to the novel, the plot should always be secondary to the characters. One of the best ways to develop your character is to have them act in ways that other people wouldn’t act, and to do things that other people wouldn’t do. They can still check the mail and go out to eat like normal people, but when they do, you aren’t giving your readers any glimpse into who they are as individuals. If you don’t give them options to act on their own, and instead yank them around through plot devices, you might have the makings for a decent action movie, but not a novel. This point reminds me of something I used to say when I was editing screenplays at UCSB: “There’s not a person alive who wouldn’t run away from an ax murderer.”

Remove Unnecessary Semi-Colons

A very common writing mistake is the overuse of semi-colons. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, used to say that all semi-colons did was “show off that you’ve been to college.” He completely swore them off in his writing, and his work didn’t suffer whatsoever as a result. While I personally value the occasional well-placed semi-colon, writers tend to go overboard. If something like twenty percent of your sentences have a semi-colon in the middle, you’re probably one of them.

If you’re using them correctly, a semi-colon should connect what would otherwise be two distinct yet similar sentences (or, less commonly, to separate items in a list). It should NOT serve as a conjunction as in the following example: “I love him; even though he doesn’t have much money, I can’t stay away.” If you’re using them accurately, the fix is easy – either replace the semi-colon with a period and capitalize what is now your second sentence, or replace it with a comma and add a conjunction. Here are some examples where a semi-colon detracts from the quality of your writing.

Example: He ran like a bat out of hell; as fast as he was going, he was so focused that he could almost count the blades of grass as he passed them.

Fix: He ran like a bat out of hell, but as fast as he was going, he was so focused that…

Example: The doors closed and I was alone. I could hardly breathe; it was as if all the air had rushed outside and I was doomed to suffocate inside those walls.

Fix: The doors closed and I was alone. I could hardly breathe. It was as if all the air had rushed outside and I was doomed to suffocate inside those walls.

Put Your Punctuation On The Inside Of Quotations

“This is the correct way to do it.”

“That’s right. It’s an easy fix that will make for a very happy editor!”

Remove Distracting Things After Quotations

He looked out from their safe-haven under the park bridge to make sure they were alone. They were.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice this place before,” he said boisterously, lord knows why.

“Yeah… Sometimes we get so busy we forget about places like these,” she replied, even though she could have just said it.

“You look pretty,” he exclaimed, even though there is no reason whatsoever he should be exclaiming anything.

…

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. If your character is going to say something, you should let their words tell us how they say it. An exception might be “he shouted,” because someone shouting might be relevant to the plot. Even then, if the line is followed by an exclamation point and somebody immediately comes by and tells him to keep it down, the reader will probably get the idea. Here is the same scene written in a simpler, much more elegant way:

He looked out from their safe-haven under the park bridge to make sure they were alone. They were.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice this place before…”

“Yeah… Sometimes we get so busy we forget about places like these,” she said.

“You look pretty.”

In the above version, I didn’t even include the initial “he said,” because it wasn’t needed. He was the last person to do an action, so it stands to reason that the dialogue would belong to him. What’s more, given that they are alone under the bridge, the “she said” on the end of the third line makes it quite clear who the initial speaker was. If you have a lot of these kinds of things in your writing, you might not want to remove them out of fear of losing some of your word count – but that would be a mistake. Word count isn’t everything. It’s better to have a short, highly polished novel than a long novel full of distracting tidbits that risk annoying your readers. (Think Albert Camus!)

Fix Dialogue Bleed

For an in-depth discussion on dialogue bleed see my previous post Common Writing Styles That Cause Problems. Keep in mind that dialogue bleed doesn’t just occur when an author decides not to use quotations. It can happen under a variety of circumstances. Make sure that the cut-off between your dialogue and description is always clear.

Remove Exposition

Exposition happens when an author tries to get out back-story in shameless ways. For example, if at the beginning of a novel, your main character is sitting on the couch, thinking about her sister whose husband has recently died in a car accident, simply because it would take too much effort to reveal it naturally through dialogue or description, you’ve written exposition. Exposition is the death of subtext, and it often illuminates things that the reader will figure out in a few pages anyway. If possible, try to remove it entirely.

A Few Extra Suggestions That Require No Explanation:

Scan manuscript for typos.
Fix accidental point of view shifts.
Remove accidental drifting into the omniscient.
Replace pointless additions in-between dialogue such as “He paused” with real action.
If a character has a catch phrase such as “The way I see it…” make sure no other character uses it. If they do, it will ring false.
Watch for excessive punctuation. The most commonly overused marks are semicolons and ellipses, exclamation points and dashes being tie for a distant third.
Check stylistic choices for consistency.
Make sure your character’s motivations don’t change too suddenly at any point.
Read your dialogue aloud, and make sure it sounds natural.

If you keep this list in mind when you edit your novel, you’ll set your project apart from the average manuscript, and make it much easier to secure an editor, agent or publisher.

Writing Prompt

Take a story you've already written and edit it! You don't need me this week, but if you do have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them!