The Longest Mile

Writing a novel is never half as bad as editing one.

If you've never endured the painstaking process that is content and style editing, there's a good chance you (and many writers like you) are much more fond of the early portions of the writing process:  spinning a web of intricate characters and bold new worlds, rotating the cultural perspective to unearth hidden truths obscured by our collective routine, and other such noble pursuits.

It's markedly more difficult to keep your idealism up when you spot the fifth consecutive typo of a simple, three-letter word. 

Make no mistake:  editing is a grueling process.  It involves combing your work page by page, word by word, letter by letter until every wrinkle has been ironed out enough for you to consider showing it to another soul (and have them rip your careful work to shreds). 

That said, good editing can be the difference between fanfiction and actual fiction.

Understand that, despite common conjecture, I don't mean to suggest that fanfiction isn't an equally valid means of artistic expression, merely that the titanic typographical catastrophes so often inherit in the genre can obscure any hope of viewing what may just be decent writing underneath.

There are really three levels of editing you need to concern yourself with, and the methods for each are different:

• Content editing - An overall sweep of your story, not the words on the page.  Fact-check yourself.  Do all the plot points still line up after you changed that one little scene halfway through?  Do you still like all the scenes you have?  How is the flow of the story as a whole?
• Style editing - Now we get to the wording:  what sounds good, what doesn't?  What feels awkward when you read it out loud?  Word choice, sentence structure and paragraph size are all suspect.
• Clean-up - Catching what spell-check missed.  This is the time-honored, time-eating process of combing for the "oops" moments throughout the work.  It's both the most trying kind of editing and the one kind you can outsource to some other poor, poor soul.  More on that in a moment...

Content editing is the easiest:  read the book cover to cover and make note of any pieces that don't add up, pieces you don't like or pieces you kind of what to add.  Jot them down.  You'll be writing them (and editing them) later. 

Try not to break your rhythm as you work your way through the book.  If possible, read the whole thing in a single sitting.  It's much harder for your brain to fill in the missing pieces that never made it to print if it doesn't get a break between.

If you're really worried about the pieces not fitting together right, outline the scenes as you reach them.  Keep it simple and high-level so you don't interrupt yourself too much, but don't use any of your own notes, only what's in the book.  You're essentially reverse-engineering your original story.  If your new outline adds up, it doesn't matter how much it does or doesn't match the original.

Style editing gets a lot harder, especially if you didn't have great English teachers in high school.  When asked how to fill the gap, most people will give the stock answer:  refer to Strunk & White's "Elements of Style," which is sort of like taking dating advice from a grad student in Psychology:  it will give you a lot of great, technical details that may or may not actually be applicable in the field.

And, in the wrong proportions, are likely to get you slapped without ever knowing why.

"Elements of Style" is a good backbone so that you don't fall on your face, but take it with a grain of salt:  it's a very academic assessment of the world of writing styles.  The truth is you'll learn a lot more about attractive writing styles by reading.  The trick then is reverse-engineering someone else's writing, and that's a whole other exercise entirely.

Which is why I recommend Leland's "Creative Writer's Style Guide."  It's less complete and technical than Strunk & White, but it's a much more practical, real-world approach to the problem.  In short, it's like taking dating advice from your best friend:  you may not know what to call it when she's projecting her deep-seated rage as an instinctual defense to the overbearing media-fueled patriarchy, but you will know which way to duck.

Understand that style is not a game of perfection; there is no "right," only what sounds good to you, what sounds good to your publisher and what you hope sounds good to a book-buying populace (and they may all sound completely different). 

This isn't said to make you feel better about your writing or to give fuel to those who will stubbornly refuse anyone's critique of their overuse of the word "egregious," but rather to reassure you that when you finally stop editing for style, there's a good chance you will still be unhappy with how it sounds. 

Reviewing a passage for style is like chewing the same piece of meat over and over:  no matter how good the cut, sooner or later, all the flavor is spent.  Be ready to set it aside and move on to a fresh piece before you feel 100% content. 

It can help to edit larger swathes at a time rather than line-by-line editing.  Thinking in pages and paragraphs allows your mind to consider those fall-flat sentences as merely the glue between two moments of awesome. 

And glue only tastes good when you're five. 

Lastly (and it should come last) is the clean-up.  Understand that content editing can create whole new scenes (or major shifts in existing scenes) and style editing will rewrite entire sentences and paragraphs, so if you spend time cleaning up typos and other miscues before now, you're just going to be doing it again at the end.  Save it for last.  You'll thank yourself later.

There are a number of tricks to spotting typos.  Reading pages backwards breaks up the natural habit of the brain to fill in pieces that may not fit, leading you to check if each word is what it should be.  Counting the commas in a paragraph can help the run-on weary.  If you've discovered your own ticks, it's not hard to devise a fitting find-and-replace search to check for them en masse.

(Personally, I like to jumble up verb endings (-ed, -s, -ing) for no particular reason, which makes it damn near impossible to spot a miscue from a proper gerund or plural noun)

There is, however, one way you don't have to worry about the tactic at all:  outsource.  Clean-up is the one part of your work that has a set right/wrong answer (whether you agree with the language or not is another thing), so it's the one part of the process you can hand to another soul.

And by "hand to" I mean "pay."

For those on a writer's diet saying "What?  Pay?  Doesn't that take monies?"  Yes, it does, and it's well-earned for any work over 70k. 

Consider the following equation:

1. You work a day job for, say, $15 an hour.
2. It takes you two weeks at 3-4 hours a night to finish editing by hand, after which time you never want to see your book or the color red ever again.
3. 3-4 hours a night for two weeks at $15 an hour comes out to $735 on the nose.  That is the amount you just paid to hate your own book.

Now consider that a dedicated temp worker can likely have the whole thing edited in about half the time if this is their primary income (6-8 hours a day), cost you no worry and may not even ask as much as you did for your 9-to-5.

So instead of blowing your own time for half a month and coming near to setting the book ablaze, you drop a lump sum on a friend or contract worker and get your book back, inked to all hell (including some errors you might not even have known were wrong), and suddenly the whole thing seems a whole lot cheaper. 

Consider also that a book you never finish costs you untold hours in the planning and writing stages.  To see it die in the home stretch because you can't stand to turn the pages anymore is far worse than hiring a contractor.  You can even follow the American business model and hand it to someone overseas if the cost has you crying.  They do have highlighters in Bangladesh.

Just be sure you know what you're getting before you go the outsourcing route:  send a sample to your potential hiree with a small sum and fixed time interval (say, $10 an hour for three hours).  Based on that, calculate your final cost, plus a little for the unexpected, and see if it still sounds like a good idea. 

If they're matching you for speed, there's a good chance you've found someone dedicated enough to muscle through.  It helps if you give yourself the same interval and compare speeds beforehand.  Just remember that you tend to nudge your own numbers, too.  If the timing is off, you at least have a segment of your work edited for all the cost of a dinner out. 

Naturally, if you're signing on with a publishing company, there's a good chance they have someone on staff already who's tasked with this very duty, so don't break your brain trying to hire a freelancer before you go sending your manuscripts out.   Mark the big ones as you do your style editing and then leave it to the professionals to comb out the rest.

One way or another, the editing has to get done.  It's a trade-off for how much better you'll feel when you read your own writing years later and only slightly cringe at how much worse it sounded then. 

Of course, if it doesn't sound worse at all, that's another problem entirely...