The Editing Author

One of my favorite parts of being an author is also being an editor.  Not only do I get to draft a story, I get to go back and polish it, refine its points and messages, and to make it a pleasurable and memorable read.

I consider myself fairly adept at editing grammar and revising structure in a manuscript.  I am able to grasp the points of a story and remember them (which I always find interesting, as I tend to have a bad memory in most other areas of my life).  I go through the manuscript over and over and get to know the story and characters presented inside and out.





Why do I do my own editing?  Well, one of the big things is that I don't have the money to pay a professional editor, nor am I currently with a publishing house where an editor has access to my work.  This has forced me from my early novel-writing days to look over my own work and make corrections.

When I first did this, I honestly had no clue what I was really doing.  The thing I was best at was grammar.  I  didn't think about sentence structure, paragraph placement, beginnings, and endings, or story coherence and cohesiveness.  I didn't know how to write elegantly, with both a rhythm and varied structure of prose.

However, over the years, starting in High School, I've learned more of the in and outs of grammar and writing stories.  I've learned how to take all those sentences and to make them fit together better in the puzzle of the entire story.  I've learned how to better present characters, and how to make the characters drive the prose and the plot.  In college I got insight into critiquing and grammar.  I was exposed to other students' writing, and we critiqued each others' works and helped make them better.  It was overall a great experience, and I'm grateful for the good and tough times I went through.

On my current revision of Book II of The Legacy Incarnate: Incarnate Dream, I am trying to look over half a chapter every day except Sundays.  I'm blasting through the manuscript.  I'm working mostly on sentence structure, along with story inconsistencies I caught in my first edit.  The next time I go through it, though, I'll be taking it slower mostly to look over story and character consistency and flow, and may not worry so much about grammar.

It's been a fun experience, one that gives me a project to work on.