On Editing (and on moving on)

I passed another milestone in the publishing process last week: I turned in the final manuscript for my novel, Chase and Charlie.

The entire editing process was quite nerve-wracking, especially since I did all my own editing (I couldn’t afford a professional editing service, though I do have a background in editing myself). Therefore, it was almost a relief to get the thing off my hands!

However, the passing of the figurative buck did not bring me the inner peace I anticipated. I still worry that I didn’t catch all the typos, or that I made a grammatical mistake or – horror of horrors! – a consistency error. But I suspect that this is normal for writers, even those with more professional editors. No matter how many times you read and reread a manuscript, poring over every word of every line of every page until your eyeballs start to bleed (and probably even after that), you are always going to wonder if you could have done better. You’re proud of your work, sure, but that won’t stop you from wondering if you could have phrased something differently or swapped out a word to make a bigger impact or send a stronger message (or a weaker one, if that was your goal).

After a certain point, though, I assume you just have to let go and move on. If you did make a mistake, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Even bestselling authors have an occasional typo in their books! If it happens to you, just chalk it up to experience and try to do better next time. If you spend all your time focusing on all the errors you might have committed, you’ll forget about all the ones you didn’t make, and about the great story you told. Now THAT would be the real mistake.

So, moving forward, I am going to try to take my own advice and hope for the best. If you’re in the same boat as I am (or are feeling similarly uncertain about something in your own life), I’ll leave you with a quote from Maya Angelou, who made this same point much more clearly and succinctly than I ever could:

“Do the best you can until you know better.

Then, when you know better, do better.”

Good luck! And let me know if I made any mistakes!