Tips 'N Treats: Week 16

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My Tip

Happy Saturday, everyone!

My parents raised me to believe this, and three or so decades later, I still promote that honesty is the best policy. So, I won’t lie to you. I spent the bulk of this week being stumped by something that was very, very obvious once I figured it out. As a result, I’m playing catch-up as I write this. More details about this mystery issue are coming on tomorrow’s Sunday post (SPOILER: it’s exciting!). For now, I’m behind and rushing and here to offer you a hard-learned tip about getting help on the things that matter.

I’ve seen a lot of controversy around the internet about paying to have one’s book edited. “Why should I pay someone to do what [insert grammar program of choice] can do?” I’m not here to discuss how a computer can make mistakes, fix some grammar, and not tell you if you’re story’s working (but I said it anyway). No, I’m here to say that the bigger issue, even bigger than the cost of an editor, is pride.

Trust me. I stumbled around a lot this week learning this lesson. My pride got in the way of me even contacting the help people (you know, the people that get paid to answer the questions I wandered around the internet looking for answers to). And what do I have to show for it? Too many hours of getting nothing done and the burning need to get almost two weeks of work done next week to make up for it. Worth it? Not at all.

The point is, don’t cut your nose off to spite your face. I was fully prepared to hire someone who knew a lot more about the issue than me. It didn’t come to that, but I would have done it without hesitation because this thing is important to me. It’s something I want to put my best foot forward on. It matters a great deal to my livelihood and is worth the cash I would have shelled out. Authors, your book is no different. You want to put the best product forward. You want to sell something you’re proud of. Grammarly or one of the many alternatives will get you part of the way, but don’t let your pride get in the way of asking for help. Don’t be afraid to pay for the things that matter. I understand the worries about money. I know the “I can do it myself” mentality. I still struggle with those thoughts. The key is to understand them. If you have the time, skills, or ability to learn easily and don’t feel you need a developmental edit, don’t get one. If you’re self-pubbing that book, get a copyedit and proofread. You’ll thank me.

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This week’s posts:
Monday: WARLORD by Miriam Newman
Wednesday: ANGELS ON OVERTIME by Ann Crawford

Guest Tip

This week, I’m pleased to welcome Richard Bradburn to Kit ‘N Kabookle. Richard is a professional editor running editorial.ie, a successful literary consultancy with clients spanning four continents. He writes about editing and writing in publications like The Irish Times and Arts and Letters Daily, and speaks regularly at writer’s conferences in Europe and the UK. He’s here to chat about the importance of self-editing, give some tips, and offer up his recently published book on the subject. Here we go…

Hi, and thanks for having me guest on your blog! It’s a pleasure to be here.

Some weeks ago, Mary, you mentioned the revered book on self-editing, Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Browne and King. It is a little long in the tooth now (first published in 1996 with a second edition in 2004), and predates Amazon and Kindle and the whole self-publishing phenomenon, but it still contains much valuable information, and helped me with my own writing, back in the day. It also taught me something important – that self-editing should be looked at as a distinct “phase” of writing a book.

There’s now a new kid on the block, called Self-editing for Self-publishers, which I hope will eventually come to be seen as picking up where Browne and King’s book left off. I felt the subject could be brought a little more up to date and also, more importantly in the light of self-publishing, set out the process of self-editing in a more structured way so that the books of those authors without the support of a publisher could be put through a process that approximates the rigours of a traditionally published book.

Because make no mistake – self-editing is hard. Many people would say that it’s harder than writing the book in the first place. You don’t have the inspiration and excitement as your writing carries you toward a dramatic and profound climax. Instead, you have the drudge job of looking for plot holes (it’s fun spotting them in other people’s work – not so much in your own), realising that you fell out of love with one character half way through and they became dull as ditchwater as a result, and trying to spot typos and punctuation fails even though your own brain is doing its best to tell you that your eyes are deceived.

A key part of the self-editing process that Browne and King’s book totally glosses over, is the preparation. What do I mean by that?

Self-editing is not writing—it’s a completely different skill, and requires a completely different frame of mind. It requires you to look at your work as a reader will, not as the author. Being able to distance yourself from your own work, acquiring the objectivity needed to properly self-edit, is a skill that can be learned. Part I of my book is all about this preparation, and I suggest four important steps in getting in to the right frame of mind to edit your own work effectively:

The secret to editing your work is simple. You need to become its reader instead of its writer.
(Zadie Smith)

TIME

So how to achieve this objectivity? Perhaps the most simple and easily accomplished method is to put some time between finishing writing the draft and beginning your editing process. This is a key step and one that’s overlooked by most writing guides. Jane Austen used to literally lock away her first drafts in a drawer and give a friend the key, with strict instructions only to let her have it back after twelve months had passed. Not many authors will have the self-control of Austen, but if you start editing your book as soon as you’ve finished writing it you’re not in an objective state of mind. You won’t see plot holes. You won’t see flaws in characters. You won’t be able to see where sentence structure is a bit clunky and, even if you do, you’ll struggle to come up with different ways of rephrasing. I suggest leaving your book at least six months, but even three months will help hugely.



FORMAT

Another way to trick your mind into thinking you’re reading something completely new is to read it in a different format to how you wrote it. If it’s possible, print it out in hardcopy, or even get a local printer to print it off in book form. If that’s impractical, doing simple things like changing the font or font size can give a bit of a jolt to the brain. Change the document to landscape format instead of portrait, or change the page size. Change the text to “justified” from “left-aligned” (or vice versa). Read the file on a different device, a laptop if you wrote it on a desktop, or a kindle if you wrote it on a laptop.



AUDIO

Another great tip to appraise your work in a fresh way is to listen to it, rather than read it. That needn’t mean expensive audiobook creation or pricey software. Most word-processing packages have a simple text-to-speech function which might sound a bit robotic, but will show you clunky sentences.



PLACE

Remove yourself physically from the place where you wrote the book. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing to work in a different room in the house, but if you can, it might help break yourself out of “writer” mode. If you have a good friend with a spare room, go and stay with them for a few weeks while you do your initial read through – the unfamiliar surroundings will impact your perception of your book. If you’re going on holiday, take your draft with you. Do a house swap. Sit in a public library, or, if the owner is okay with it, a local coffee shop. If all of that is too complicated, follow the example of my playwright friend who wrote his drafts in a studio in a barn, but did all his editing in bed!



Summary

There are four tips for getting yourself in the right frame of mind to edit your own work. It’s all about achieving some measure of objectivity, so that you can see your work as others will see it, instead of as you wrote it. I hope it helps!

Self-editing for Self-publishers, available to order in paperback and hardback from all good bookshops, or in ebook from Amazon, Apple Books and Kobo.

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