Editing secrets? I don’t have any editing secrets. In fact, I am really excited to read everyone else’s posts revealing their editing secrets this week so that I can steal them.
I have no editing process because I have yet to significantly edit anything. In general, when I’ve “edited” a manuscript, I’ve made cosmetic changes: grammar corrections, delete extra adverbs/adjectives and unneeded passages, and make the remaining sentences prettier. Maybe tweak dialog a bit. But I honestly haven’t ever taken the editing process past surface level.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried. I always make notes for bigger edits, send out my manuscript to my trusted writing friends for their feedback, and I always have big plans for revision. At first. But then I get overwhelmed and never make them. The Novel Graveyard gets bigger every year as I write and drop project after project.
Maybe nothing I’ve written has been worthy of the edits needed. Maybe I’m just a lazy writer because I won’t actually do the hard work that’s needed to perfect a manuscript. Maybe it’s my fear of success as much as my fear of failure that keeps me from ever polishing anything beyond Zero Draft status. I don’t know.
My editing goal, of course, is to someday edit a manuscript within an inch of its life and actually submit it. Hopefully someday I’ll get out of the lazy chair and do that. In the meantime, I have smaller goals: like write some short stories and edit them. And edit them again and then submit them places.
I suppose my biggest editing secret right now is that I need practice. And confidence. My fellow Confabulators assure me that working with something smaller than a one-hundred-thousand word manuscript will give me the editing skills I need, while getting published will give me the confidence I need. Baby steps, right?
For now, I am listening to all of my fellow writers’ editing secrets with open ears. Enlighten me, friends.
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