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How To Edit Your Own Writing

Posted on by Valerie

Developing an intentional writing habit is great, but eventually you need to get serious about evaluating what you have written. For some writers this qualifies as fun, for other writers misery. Regardless, learning how to edit your own writing remains a necessary part of the overall process.

Contents

  • Make Your Message Clear
  • Change Where and How You Edit
  • Choose Your Words Carefully
  • Your Writing Needs Time To Rest
  • Read Your Own Writing

Make Your Message Clear

Knowing how to edit your own writing is about more than just structural changes and grammar reviews. When you critically examine your own words you need to get to the heart of your message and ensure your voice comes across as intended. This is true for both fiction and non-fiction works.

To help you focus, you may want to revisit some of your reasons for writing. If it helps, write out your core purposes for wanting to write the particular book, short story, poem, or memoir you are reviewing. Not sure where to start? Think about how you want someone to feel when they read the last line. Come up with a target audience avatar—an image of your ideal reader. What do you want this person to get out of your writing?

Change Where and How You Edit

When you think about editing, do you picture yourself sitting at your desk with a stack of printed out manuscript pages and a red pen? While that will definitely work—and it’s highly likely you will spend some time doing exactly that—changing your assumptions about what editing looks like will benefit your writing greatly.

Try editing in different places. If you are able, take your work in progress to a coffee shop or a restaurant during a non-peak time of day. If you have access to your own porch, deck, or backyard consider reading your manuscript outside. Or find a nice spot at a public park or other outdoor venue. If you normally do your writing at a desk try moving to the couch, or your bed, or the kitchen table. A new location might change your mindset enough that you notice new things.

Change the tools you use to make corrections. Try using different colored pens, or colored pencils, or typing notes to yourself in an app on your phone. Print your draft using a different color paper. Or print the document with two book pages for every sheet of printer paper.

You may also find it helpful to edit something other than a stack of printed pages. Some writers prefer to edit directly on screen, which could mean reading on your computer or your phone. If you are not terribly far along and are not yet concerned about formatting, try adjusting the font, as sometimes that simple change will make previously undetected issues more obvious.

A final suggestion, which I recently began using to edit my own drafts and highly recommend: copy and paste your entire document into a text-to-speech app and listen to it being read aloud. This is an excellent way to catch issues with subject-verb agreement, pacing, and awkward phrasing. 

Choose Your Words Carefully

Bookmark {or download the app for} a good dictionary and thesaurus combination. {Merriam-Webster is an excellent choice.} Consult it any time you are not sure about a spelling, or to confirm the definition of an uncommon word, or to search for a more specific way of stating your ideas.

Are you using the same word or phrase too many times? {The “find” feature comes in handy here.} This is especially important in a book-length work, because the repetition may not be obvious to you if you work on one chapter at a time.

Can you easily change passive verbs to an active alternative? Does your writing rely too much on adverbs? I mean, I love a good adverb, but sometimes searching for them will show you places where you could have used a stronger verb instead.

Your Writing Needs Time To Rest

Sometimes the best thing you can do to improve your writing is to leave it alone for a while. You need to be comfortable walking away from your own writing. This becomes especially important when dealing with a book manuscript or other longer work.

Putting aside what you think is a finished document and leaving it sit for a few days {or weeks} is extremely difficult for writers. We fall irrationally in love with our own thoughts and our own words and feel like we’re abandoning them if we don’t see them every day. Yet this is probably the most critical part of writing and editing. You cannot see what you want to fix unless you take a substantial break from staring at it.

Read Your Own Writing

When you finish writing and share it somewhere that people can find it and read it, your work is done, right? Well, not really. You should periodically take a look at your own published writing.

This tip is simple but one many folks may not consider. You need to read your own writing if you want to improve it. Review your own published work. Find a major typo? There is probably a way to fix it before the next printing.

Pull your website up on your phone and scroll through your recent posts. You want to see exactly what your readers see. You will find mistakes. This will horrify you at first, then you will be relieved you can easily fix them. Taking a step back from your writing and viewing it through the eyes of a reader can also be helpful when you feel like you’re having trouble moving forward.

What creative methods can you implement as you learn how to edit your own writing?

Valerie Fowler lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with her husband and three children. When she's not writing, she enjoys reading non-fiction, listening to podcasts, and taking too many pictures of her cat.

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The face of a cat who definitely wants something. The face of a cat who definitely wants something. #oscardarwin
We thought about starting school this week, but de We thought about starting school this week, but decided to take a few more days off. ❤️

Aiming for next Wednesday as our official first day of 11th, 9th, and 6th grade. 📚

Our #catprincipal is reviewing book and workbook choices and approving the agenda. 🐱

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This gorgeous 1950s dress is one of several items This gorgeous 1950s dress is one of several items we came home with after exploring my mom’s basement last week. 👗

Unfortunately, it is too small even for Agent J, who is smaller than either Agent E or myself. 😕

Going to pass it on, and we hope whoever finds it loves it. ❤️
World’s Best Cat Sitter left this for Oscar when World’s Best Cat Sitter left this for Oscar when she checked on him while we were at my mom’s last week, and we gave it to him today. He would not move his head from the food bowl until it was completely gone. And he was super happy and relaxed afterward. Now he’s like, I need more of this in my life. 🤣🐱❤️ #oscardarwin
What writer hasn’t dreamed of seeing their words What writer hasn’t dreamed of seeing their words printed in a book? For some this fantasy includes landing an agent and a contract with an advance. For others a more realistic approach will be to take matters into their own hands. Is self-publishing right for you?

Not long ago, anything other than querying a gatekeeper and hoping to be let in would have been considered vanity. This is no longer the case. Forget everything you thought you knew about creating a book outside of the traditional publishing realm. Self-publishing today is a respectable, viable choice for many writers.

Pursuing traditional publishing requires a lot of mental energy and not everyone will want to take that on. It is also a lengthy endeavor {months or even years before you see your beloved creation on a bookstore shelf}. Before you decide to self-publish instead, however, you should consider the following points and think about whether it is truly the best path for you.

Continue reading at https://www.valeriefowlerwrites.com/is-self-publishing-right-for-you/ {link in bio}.

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Agent E and Agent J ❤️ #nationalsistersday Agent E and Agent J ❤️
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Agents with their cousins {minus one} and my mom { Agents with their cousins {minus one} and my mom {Ba}. ❤️
At my mom’s for a few days, and her neighbor’s At my mom’s for a few days, and her neighbor’s cat came over for a visit. 🥰

It’s very difficult to get a good picture of a black cat that won’t stop moving. 😆

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I’m not a big take a picture of your food kind o I’m not a big take a picture of your food kind of person, but I have never had chicken and waffles before, and I feel like I’m in a #webarebears episode. 🐻🐼🐻‍❄️🍗🧇
Periodic social media clean out time. 🥳 Going Periodic social media clean out time. 🥳

Going through pages and people I follow and {with a few exceptions} unfollowing accounts that haven’t posted in the last year. Also removing “followers” who have scammy vibes or send weird DMs. {No, I am not interested in your vast knowledge of cryptocurrency.} 🙄 

I know some folks like to see the higher numbers {people always seemed especially obsessed with this on Twitter for some reason?} but I prefer to have a more accurate count. 🧐

Also, I always DO try to follow back fellow writers and secular homeschoolers, so please say hello! 👋

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Let go of the notion that you need to write only h Let go of the notion that you need to write only happy, positive pieces that most people agree with. Of course, there’s no need to be intentionally unkind or mean. But try to release yourself from the idea that having opinions is something to be self-conscious about. If you do not have strong feelings about your non-fiction topics or your fiction storylines, your readers won’t either.

Remember: There will always be people who respond negatively for the sake of being negative. Someone will always claim they know you better than you know yourself, or attempt to convince you your feelings are not justified. You are not writing for them.

Of course, not holding back does not mean you need to share pieces that are not reflective of your true self. We all need firm boundaries to thrive. Being uncomfortable is not a virtue.

Read the full post at: https://www.valeriefowlerwrites.com/how-to-start-writing/ {or click on the link in bio}

#intentionalwriting #howtostartwriting #writersofinstagram
If you don’t come home with at least one impulse If you don’t come home with at least one impulse item, did you even go to @target ??? ❤️🎃🎄🎯
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New book for #morningreadingtime ❤️📚 #artof New book for #morningreadingtime ❤️📚
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If you are going to take yourself seriously as a w If you are going to take yourself seriously as a writer, you need to learn how to prioritize your writing. 

This does not simply mean coming up with a plan to work on a particular project or to write at a certain time each day. Becoming an intentional writer is more than just forcing a new writing routine into your already full schedule. 

You need to carefully consider the why and the how. WHY is writing not currently as high a priority as you would like? HOW can you work within your established commitments to spend more energy on writing? 

Read the full post at:  https://www.valeriefowlerwrites.com/how-to-prioritize-your-writing/ {or click on the link in bio}. 

#intentionalwriting #intentionalwriter #writing #writersofinstagram #priorities
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The cat knows he has an open can of food in the fr The cat knows he has an open can of food in the fridge and he wants it right meow. #caturday #oscardarwin #catsofinstagram #catsinthekitchen
Organized the other bookshelf, too. 😉 This one Organized the other bookshelf, too. 😉

This one is all of our fiction books. Everything from Poppleton and Curious George to Dan Brown and V.C. Andrews. 👀

The only books we have put away in a box are board books and other similar titles that have been very loved {i.e., are mostly destroyed} but we can’t part with. 😌

Can you tell they like Warriors? That photo only shows some of them. 😆

Vader standing guard as always. ❤️

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