On Editing: Take a Break

I am not conceited enough to assume that I could tell you in one blog post all you need to know about editing your manuscript, however I would like to share one piece of advice that I have found particularly useful. It should be done before checking your work for strings of meaningless, overused, irritating adjectives… before combing your text for too many commas… even before making sure you have closed all your quotes.
The best part is, it is really simple.

Take a break between writing and editing.

I don’t know about anyone else but I find that writing a scene does not happen all at once. I get an idea, I plan it in my head and then I start to put it together. Halfway through, I realise something does not work so I go back and change a word here, a sentence there, over and over until it takes shape and eventually grows into what I had aimed for. When it is finally done I have usually gone over it so many times that I can almost recite it by heart… and therein lies the problem.

I am too close.
Can’t see the wood for the trees. (Did I neglect to mention eliminating cliches, earlier?)

How often I have tweaked and checked a piece of prose, printed it, re-checked and re-printed only to find, when reading it aloud later at my Writer’s Group meeting, errors that I had missed in the previous twenty passes.

So do yourself a favour. Write it, then set it aside. Carry on writing something else. Keep moving forward. How long you wait is up to you. A couple of days, a week or even a month, if you have that luxury.

But give it time to fade from your memory so that when you go back for editing you are able to see it for what it is, not for what you thought it was.