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.
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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?