Edit Your Own Work: Tips for Revisions

Writing can be a challenging task, but editing can be equally as difficult. After spending countless hours crafting a piece of writing—whether a novel or an essay—it can be hard to step back and objectively evaluate your work. However, editing is a crucial part of the writing process. It is through editing that your writing transforms from a rough draft to a polished final product. Let’s look at different techniques that can help you learn to edit your own work effectively.

Step Away and Come Back with Fresh Eyes

One of the most important things you can do when editing your own work is to step away from it for a while. This means taking a break from your writing, whether it's for a few days, a week, or even longer. The longer the piece, the more time you may want to give it. When you return to your writing, you'll be able to look at it with fresh eyes. This distance will allow you to spot errors, inconsistencies, and plot holes that you may have missed before.

While it's important to take a break, you don't want to forget about your writing entirely. Work on a different project (perhaps of a different scope than the one you will be editing), and jot down any ideas or insights that come to mind that may apply to the work that needs editing. These notes can be invaluable when you return to your writing.

Focus on One Edit at a Time

When editing your writing, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of changes that need to be made. To avoid this, focus on one thing at a time. Typically, edits start from the largest scale and then work their way down to the specific—this saves you from reworking an awkward sentence only to find out later that you need to delete the entire paragraph.

The first questions you want to ask will also vary by your goals. For writers planning to submit work to a traditional publisher or literary journal, it may be worthwhile to start by considering industry standards in your genre. If a contemporary fiction novel stretches out over 100,000 words, for example, you’ll need to start by trimming it down to suit genre expectations (around 75,000-85,000 words for contemporary fiction). But if you are planning to keep your work private or self-publish (and don’t care to conform to reader expectations), industry standards may not matter as much to you.

Next, you’ll want to consider your story as a whole. Visual thinkers may want to build an outline of the plot, with chapters and the scenes within them represented in a list or a diagram. This can make it easier to spot if your focus is on the correct characters, and if each character has the expected amount of time on the page. This exercise makes it easy to spot, for example, a main character who disappears for too long due to a subplot that gained momentum as you wrote it. It also gives you the perspective you need to tighten and rearrange scenes that are out of place.

Once these large-scale edits are complete to your satisfaction, you can move on to reconciling any plot holes or inconsistencies created by your edits, and then consider your style and flow.

Print Out Your Draft 

Another helpful editing tip is to print out your draft and edit it on paper. While editing on a computer screen can be convenient, it can also make it easier to overlook errors. When you edit on paper, you can see your writing in a new context and catch errors that you might have missed otherwise.

Editing on paper can help you focus on the big picture. You'll be able to see how your writing flows and, because the format itself is different than when you were writing, your brain may be less likely to skim over errors you’d miss on the computer screen.

Try scanning the page and only looking at the length of your paragraphs, or only reading the first sentence of each one. If your paragraphs are constantly running to the length of half a page or more, you may want to consider condensing ideas or breaking them into smaller pieces to preserve your story’s pacing. For writers at the other extreme, very short paragraphs or pages full of single-line dialogue exchanges may be missing the details about setting, emotional context, and physical gestures that are necessary to ground the reader in your world.

Being able to make notes and edits directly on the page will also give you a visual record of your revisions, in case you need to refer back to them or compare to other sections of your work as you progress through the piece.

Read Your Writing Out Loud

Another great editing technique is to read your writing out loud. When you read silently, it's easy to skim over mistakes or awkward phrasing. However, when you read out loud, you'll hear your writing in a new way. You'll be able to identify sentences that are too long or unnatural sounding dialogue. Additionally, reading out loud can help you spot spelling and grammar errors by forcing your brain to slow down.

For writers who intend to conduct readings, speaking your work out loud is great practice and can help you spot potentially embarrassing tongue twisters before reading in front of a crowd.

Get Feedback from Others

Finally, consider getting feedback from others to help with your revision process. This could mean sharing your writing with a trusted friend or family member, or it could mean hiring a professional editor. Feedback from others can be invaluable, as it can help you identify blind spots and weaknesses in your writing.

Remember, even the most esteemed writers rely on editors to help them polish their work, and there’s good reason for that—the various stages of editing require vastly different perspectives. It’s incredibly uncommon for a single person to be able to look at the macro and the micro to flesh out all of the potential issues with a first draft.

Developmental editors are experts in story structure but may miss typos, while line editors and proofreaders may not notice if there’s a minor character or story arc that is distracting from your work’s overall impact, but they are pros at spotting and correcting awkward phrasing.

Key Takeaways: Editing Your Own Work

Editing is a critical part of the writing process, helping writers organize and focus their first drafts to turn their writing into an inspired work of art. 

To edit your writing effectively, the most important thing you can do is take a break and come back with fresh eyes. The editing process can feel overwhelming, but by focusing on one aspect of your writing at a time and taking in your writing in different ways, you can make many improvements on your own. Just be mindful that your perspective may be sharper in certain areas of editing than others, so you can get feedback from others who may look at your prose from a different angle.  

These tips will help you transform your rough draft into a polished final product.