Learning how to edit your own work is crucial for a writer.
When it comes to my own writing, I crush easy. I fall in love with sentences, placing them on pedestals like God himself penned them rather than little ol’ me. I feel like they’re etched in stone, like I can’t hit backspace a few times and make them disappear. It’s a problem a lot of beginning writers have. In a perfect world, we’d have editors to send our stuff to and kick back while they go nuts with red ink and spit it back spick and span. But this ain’t a perfect world, and we’re not nearly successful enough to afford those dudes, so the next best option is ourselves. Being a good self-editor is important for a young writer. It allows us to screen our writing and weed out a good chunk of the faultiness in it. I’m no expert, but in the last year I’ve improved my editing abilities a lot with a few steps I’ve learned through experimentation and experience.
The first step was understanding that I’m actually not a perfect writer and really just mediocre at best right now. That was hard to accept because nobody likes thinking they suck, but fact is, if you’re just starting out with fiction, poetry, or whatever, you suck…at least a little. The good thing is that it’s OK because you’re expected to suck. In fact I’ve read countless interviews with writers who seem to dwell on the fact they sucked so much before publishing a hit book. Don’t worry, we’re in good company.
The second step was gradually learning that nothing I wrote was bulletproof. Like I mentioned before, I often had the idea that I couldn’t delete a lot of what I wrote. Not because I didn’t have it in my heart, but like literally couldn’t, like it wasn’t an even option for me. I would find myself trying to build around a couple sentences or ideas I felt were perfect (when they actually weren’t) and because of that, screw everything else up and render those “perfect” sentences and ideas useless. To fix that, I stopped sweating little fragments of my work and focused on the piece itself. I started asking myself questions like “what am I really trying to say here?” instead of “how can I make this sexy sentence work?”
The third step came from meeting a guy named Lawrence Downes, an editorial writer at The New York Times. In three words Lawrence gave me the best advice about self-editing I’ve ever received: Elements of Style. For those who don’t know, that’s the title of a book by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. If you’ve never read it and are serious about this writing thing, stop reading now and go buy it. It’s like five bucks. The book is essential for any writer of any format (novel, essay, journalism, whatever), because it lays out steps to write clean concise language everyone can understand, and only takes one sitting to get through. The big lesson I took away from that book was to always be on the look out for words that can be eliminated. If a sentence works after deleting a “the” or “that”, do it. If there’s one word that says what you just said in three, put it down. Pretend words cost money and you want to use as few as possible to get your message across.
This last thing isn’t really a step, more like a tip, something I picked up working for newspapers the last couple years. After I’m done writing something, I’ll read it out loud to myself and look for anything sounding really awkward. This gives me a sense of what my stuff sounds like to another reader and ensures they’re not asking, “what the heck does this guy mean?” while reading. I’ve written plenty of grammatically and structurally sound sentences that are just really damn awkward when read with the entire piece, and saying every word out loud catches them most of the time.
I’ve picked up these things purely from writing a lot in the last year, and I think that in itself is the best tip I can share. Write a lot. Soon you’ll notice what sounds good and what doesn’t.
Please let me know if there’s anything you feel I left out. It’ll be of good to everyone, including me.
