Editing Week Day Two: You're a Terrible Editor, and This Is Why

Writers and proofreaders are rarely the same people. There’s a reason for that. Just because we can edit other people’s work, doesn’t mean we can edit our own. Ask me. I proofread my own work all the time, and when it’s passed onto an editor, I still receive a veritable bloodbath of red marks. The size of your own objectivity is at its lowest after you’ve just written something. That objectivity grows with every passing day, so if you do try to edit your work on the day you wrote it, don’t assume you’ll do a good job. You will not. You must develop the capacity to see your work through a new pair of glasses.

Time is a fair way to get those glasses. You must forget your work before you can edit it. I usually edit my work after:

One day
One week
One month
One year.

Yes, all four because it takes far longer to edit a piece than write it. By the time I’ve hit Day 365, I can usually tell that 90% of my work needs to be thrown away. I only publish around 10% of the pieces I write. This matters because I wouldn’t have much of a reputation in the writing scene if I always submitted my first draft. Editors would see me as an amateur and blacklist me. They will do it to you, as well.

I’ve given you a few tools to expedite this process—The Hemingway App, Grammarly, and a few style guides. These are proofreading tools. They can catch rudimentary mistakes, but they can’t help you to sculpt a new piece into something worthwhile. You’ve got to do that work without the help of technology. While a workshop or a mentor are good tools for that, we spoke about their limitations yesterday—if you get an editor too soon after you’ve written your draft, you risk losing the piece you intended to write in the first place. Give it a week at the absolute bloody minimum. If you’re serious, give it a few months or even a year.