7 Tips for the Reluctant Editor

During the NaNoWriMo Now What? Months, we’re focused on helping you revise, edit, and publish your story. Of course, sometimes it’s difficult to make yourself do the necessary editing work on your novel draft. Today, author and Municipal Liaison Rebecca Frost shares some editing advice for the reluctant editor:

I absolutely love NaNoWriMo. I’ve been participating since 2010 and I’ll NaNoVangelize at the drop of a hat. I love the creativity, the comradery, and the craziness. My least favorite part is the editing that comes after. It’s a vital step, though, and I’ve come to terms with my process, so I’d like to share some tips in case you, too, are a Reluctant Editor.

1. Give yourself some distance. 

My personal rule is that I won’t start editing something until it’s been sitting for a month. If I write “The End” and then flip right back to page one, I’m too close to my book, and I’ve got the story arc still fresh in my mind so I can’t see what doesn’t actually work. I’ll save my novel in a couple different places, just in case, and then come back to it to give myself the best shot at coming to it fresh.

2. Print your novel. 

We read very differently on screens than we do on paper, which generally means we read them more closely. Printing something also helps my brain shift from creation mode into editing mode and forces me to let my inner editor out of wherever I’ve stashed him for November.

3. Color code your comments. 

I usually go in with two colors because I’ll be looking for two specific things. One of them will be for overarching comments about plot or consistency: were his eyes always blue? Did I already use “Allison” for a minor secondary character? The second will be for the mechanics: missing commas, grammar, typos, that sort of thing.

4. Read it out loud. 

My mouth moves when I’m editing. Many people read faster than they can talk, and forcing yourself to say—or mouth—the words slows you down so you can catch what you actually wrote on the page instead of what you think you wrote. If you have amazingly patient friends you can ask them to read it to you and listen for where they stumble, but many word processing programs also have a “Read Aloud” option. They can be a bit robotic, but also infinitely more patient than human subjects, and will let you listen to exactly what you have on the page so you can find those pesky typos.

5. Make very specific notes to yourself. 

There are times when I have a huge gap between my first editing read-through on paper and going back to actually input those changes digitally, and I’m often confronted with a margin note of “Huh?” or a highlighted passage with no further clue as to what Past Me was thinking. It can feel like a waste of time to carefully write out why I’m confused or how this sentence doesn’t quite fit, but Future Me really depends on those notes to make the overall changes.

6. Make yourself accountable. 

Editing is one of my least favorite steps of the process. I’d go so far as to call it a “necessary evil.” I like using the Page Count setting during Camp NaNoWriMo so I can see my graph grow. I also tend to post to social media during my writing process where my friends will check in and bug me if I go too many days without posting. One of the major benefits of NaNoWriMo is that we’re all going through it together during the wild writing process, so I like to lean on my friends for the editing process, too.

7. Set reasonable goals. 

Some days are better for editing than others. It takes a lot of a certain kind of concentration to be that focused, and sometimes my brain just isn’t up for it. I definitely can’t edit for as long as I can write, and I have to be realistic about how much progress I can make in a day.

Rebecca Frost is the author of The Ripper’s Victims in Print: The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929—drafted in November 2016 as a rebel project, edited during Camp NaNoWriMo in April 2017, and published by McFarland in 2018. A Wrimo since 2010, she has been the ML for Michigan :: Upper Peninsula since 2012 and serves as her writing group’s main reference for murder and body disposal.

Top photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash.