Why Editors Rock

Okay, you know how some great writers seem to go sharply downhill over the years? Like their once-tight narratives balloon into 200k-word epics for no reason, nothing seems focused, the verbiage gets sloppy, and their work starts feeling like Amateur Hour from start to finish?

That's because they stopped listening to their editors.

A good editor is a writer's secret weapon. Their hold-out derringer. Their fully-functioning Death Star. Let me tell you a little something about my process, and you'll see what I mean. Every time I sit down to write, I start by reading the last chapter or two and doing touch-up edits. That helps get me in the right headspace, and reminds me of any recent details I might have changed from the outline.

Once the book is done, I do a comprehensive self-edit, then send it to my beta readers for feedback. Then I do a second full self-edit based on their notes. Then I move the book from Scrivener to a Word file, and in doing so, run a third edit. Usually a fourth.

That said? Know what was in my book and got caught by my editor, among a billion other errors? "I took a peak."

I TOOK A PEAK. Five reads, in all, and I missed that embarrassing chunk of fail. My eyes just slipped over it, each and every time.

That's just one tiny example. The truth is, you can't self-edit. You CAN'T. Our brains are amazingly good at skipping tiny details to grasp the whole of a big picture, and that's kind of a problem when your job is to catch those tiny details. More than that, a good editor will let you know how they took the story, how they reacted, and point out the bits that might be perfect in YOUR head but utterly incomprehensible to a reader.

Any good writer has an editor. Fact, incontrovertible fact, end of discussion. (My editor, for the record, is Kira Rubenthaler with Bookfly Design. You should hire her, if you ever need editing work. But not too often, because then she won't have time for MY books and I'll be terribly cross.)