I bet you cringed when you saw those three words! My granddaughter has be singing the song from the movie Frozen non-stop. However, when it comes to your writing I want you to remember those words.
I think I need to explain something before I begin this article. I am a writer. I am not an editor. They are two separate gifts and skills. However, as a writer, I need to edit my work as best I can before I submit it to anyone. It is the sign of a professional and I learned this the hard way. Let me tell you my story.
Most of my working life, I worked as a registered nurse. I could give you the meaning of all the medical abbreviations, and muddle through the most illegible handwriting to figure out what the doctors wanted me to do. However, as my nursing career was coming to an end, I started fooling around with writing. I wrote some magazine articles, and to my surprise they were published. This encouraged me. After a detailed dream, I decided to write a novel based on the dream. The story was fascinating. The tale followed three woman and how God touched them. As their stories intertwined, they each learned humility in different ways. I was so excited.
However, at that time, Catholic fiction was not very popular, so imagine my surprise when I found a secular publisher. The dilemma was that he was a small publisher and I had to edit it myself. The sad thing was that I believed I could do it! I couldn’t afford to pay a professional editor, nor do I think I even knew how to find one. I did the best I could. I had my friends look at it, and being friends, not editors, they assured me that it was great. Bleary-eyed and unskilled at editing, I tried to make it perfect. The publisher went over it. When it was published, I was so proud! Almost as proud as when my babies were born.
That pride soon turned into shame. People started telling me that they loved the story, but had trouble with all the typos and errors. Looking over the now-published volume, I found error after error. It was too late to pull it back. It was out there and it is probably still floating around in online cyberspace. It is something I will always regret, and it so embarrassed me that I almost gave up writing. Luckily for me, not for him, the publisher went out of business. I was able to have the manuscript professionally edited, and I self-published the new version.
I never, ever want you to experience what I did, so I am going to devote the next few weeks to sharing what I have learned along the way.
The first thing I want to teach you is that once you finish your first draft, you need to put it away. File it on your computer and let it leave your mind. This is not an easy thing to do. You have lived with your manuscript for so long – you want to rush to the second draft. Don’t do it. In fact, if you can wrap your writing mind around something else, it is best to forget about your manuscript for a few weeks. I take this time to read the books that have been piling up on my nightstand waiting for reviews. Reading someone else’s work gets me absorbed in other tales and helps me forget the work that awaits me.
Why does this help? Because I have been so close to my work that I would never see an error if it smacked me right in the kisser. Once I have been away from the manuscript for a few weeks, I am always shocked by the mistakes I find. I have fresh eyes. I have learned that initially I read what I think I have written. After a few weeks, I read what I actually wrote.
So before you begin to edit your work, leave it alone. Yes, let it go! Step One of successful editing is to let it be for a while! Don’t skip this step! Give your mind a rest and we will start the hard work next week!
Karen Boyce
Karen Kelly Boyce lives on a farm in N.J. with her retired husband. She is a mother and grandmother. She is the author of “The Sisters of the Last Straw” series published by Tan Books. You can see her work and learn more about her on her website: www,kkboyce.com
ha… I even must proof read a comment. See error above.
Agreed. Although I am not published yet, I have discovered a mulitude of errors magically appear when I put my stuff away for a week or so
I agree wholeheartedly about how difficult it is to see your own work and how very helpful the Catholic critique group has been, Providential even. What a blessing! Excellent, eye-opening, and enjoyable too!
Dear Karen,
The Guild’s Catholic Fiction Critique Group provides excellent feedback, one chapter at a time. Every participant sees and comments on the various issues with my offerings.
I’m “comma-challenged,” so I may have the right number of commas, but some commas sneak into the wrong places. (I’m wondering, did that last compound sentence have two independent clauses requiring a comma before the conjunction?)
Then there’s the POV. Sometimes a character will say something that falls outside his or her “Point Of View.” Mercifully, my wonderful critique partners never let those pesky characters, or me, get away with such POVerty of writing.
My closeness to the story means that I assume that everyone knows what’s going on. Often, I come out of the blue without sufficient “context.” Again, the critique group members ride to the rescue and point out the absence of a relationship between the opening of one chapter and the close of the previous chapter.
The Guild’s Catholic Fiction Critique Group is a treasure. It’s members are wonderful friends who gently share advice. While I get to ignore my latest chapter, they shake it down and shake it up. By the time it returns to me, not only do I see it with fresh eyes, but my critique partner shares her or his objective view. I have to admit that I missed many problems. Of course, after I deal with the first set of errors, I’ve probably introduced some more. That’s when the chapter goes to another group member for further review.
Thanks Karen and thanks to each of the members of The Guild’s Catholic Fiction Critique Group. They are a guild within The Guild.
God Bless,
Don
“All first drafts are trash.” That was said by some famous author. I let blogs sit overnight usually. I also read my work a minimum of four times, at least twice slowly and out loud. I use Grammar & Spell Check to find obvious issues (but these have there own problems). If I can get fresh eyes on it I do it.
Amen! As both a writer and an editor professionally, I can affirm 100 percent what you advise. I even try to wait a day or two before finalizing a blog, a rest period for a book review or interview post is not a luxury, but an essential,