Ask the Editor: Tips for self-editing burnout

Nicole Langan asks: "What are some helpful tips on how an author can train their own editing eye even when they've read their own work a million times?"

Kathryn Craft replies:

When looking at my own work for the umpteenth time, here’s the problem I run into: no matter how steely my intentions for self-editing, I am immediately caught up, once again, in my protagonist’s plight. I may have started out looking for continuity issues (Continuity issues! Continuity issues!), but by page four or five I am seduced once again by the story’s central drama.

Sound familiar? The way to counter this is to engage your inner critic while simultaneously disrupting your reading response. To do this I find it imperative that I not read my story through in order. Your word processor’s “find” function can help you by targeting select issues while keeping you out of the intention-bending mire of your own prose. When the word processor plunks you down on a new page, address the issue it found and then read the whole page to look for anything else that pops up.

Here are some favorite methods that keep me from falling under my own story’s spell.

Overused words. We all have favorite words we lean on. As you identify yours, put them into a special list to check for. But you can start with these: even, just, there, that, well, so and very. These words can often be removed to the betterment of the prose. While you’re at it, check for nondescript words such as beautiful, pretty, handsome, ugly, and delicious, whose meanings are often too subjective to be useful, and add evocative description to support your claim. Many writers overuse adverbs, so run a search for “ly” and see if the adverbs that float to the surface could be skimmed off if you chose more specific verbs.

POV filters. Search for words such as realized, thought, saw, noticed, glanced and see if the prose works without them. Such words can often exhibit a lack of confidence in one’s ability to establish point of view. If you put us into a character’s head and stay there, we’ll know whose observations and opinions are being put forth without attribution.

Melodrama: Scan for quirks of emphasis such as italics, all caps, or exclamation points. See if you can evoke drama through true conflict instead of trying to convince your reader through typesetting histrionics. Scan for emotion words—happy, sad, frustrated, angry, etc.—and see if you might have already evoked that emotion without having to name it outright. If you haven’t, give it a try. If you write emotion as biology, you might check for words like stomach, toes, pound, tears or temple and see if you can find a way to use setting to indirectly evoke the emotion instead.

Spacing errors. You do know that you shouldn’t be putting two spaces after your periods anymore, right? That’s a throwback from the mono-spaced fonts of the typing era. It is no longer necessary—and in fact, it’s improper (self-publishers, beware!). But this isn’t merely an end-of-sentence issue. Double spaces have a way of infiltrating the center of our sentences, too, usually because we’ve used the cut-and-paste feature and left behind a souvenir. Did you know you can use the “find” function in Word to locate double spaces? When the dialogue box comes up, type in two spaces. You won’t be able to see a thing—but when you hit “find next,” the word processor will direct you to double spaces. This is a fun way to edit sentences for concision as the processor drops you into new pages. Since for some reason this method doesn’t catch all double spacing errors, I always double-check the old-fashioned way, by tipping each page away from me to look for uniform rivers of white on the page.

Tension edit. Flip open your manuscript to random pages and see if you can find a way to increase the tension on that page.

Character edit. Put a character's name into the "find" function and read only the parts of the story pertaining to him/her. This is a great way to check for redundant scenes and to see if each character has a believable growth arc.

Structural edit. For this I suggest you work back-to-front to avoid the narrative’s hypnotic pull. From the end, flip back to the beginning of the last scene. Read until you identify your protagonist's scene goal and write it down. Back up a scene, and do the same, writing down the results at the top of your page, repeating until you come to the climax. From there forward you’ll also want to make sure that each scene includes some obstacle that keeps your character from achieving his goal (whether or not that obstacle is surmounted). When you get to the opening, analyze your inciting incident and write down what story question it raised. When you are done you will have a story outline created from what you have actually written—not what you had hoped to write. Read it through and look for places where you might have drifted from the story question raised in your opening. And of course make sure you opened by putting the right question in your reader’s mind!

Chapter endings/beginnings. Flip through your manuscript and check to see whether each chapter ends with resonance and tension, and whether each new chapter opens with a hook.

Critique partner/editor. Let's face it: by the time you're on round five or six with your manuscript, all previous versions co-exist in your head. You can no longer be a good judge of how things are adding up on the page. At this point, the best thing for your manuscript might be a fresh perspective.

I realize that this post reads like a table of contents—each suggestion could be a post, a chapter, perhaps even a book of its own. But because Nicole’s question was such a good one, I wanted to put these all in one place so our readers can pop it into their toolkits. If you have additional methods for countering self-editing burnout, please leave a comment! 

Kathryn Craft is a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, an independent manuscript evaluation and line editing service. Her novel based on true events, The Far End of Happy, releases on Tuesday (May 5). She is the author of The Art of Falling, also by Sourcebooks. Her monthly series, "Turning Whine into Gold," appears at Writers in the Storm. Connect with Kathryn at her Facebook Author Page and Twitter.