Taking A Break After Writing To Edit Your Work

Editing.

It's the essential step some writers hate, and therefore avoid like the plague, while others are addicted to, meaning that they can never get passed the first page. It's a tough enough process as it is, but regardless of which side of the spectrum you lie on, there is one golden rule that always must be followed after completing a body of work, and that's to give yourself some distance before revising your own creation.

Editing Our Work Is Crucial

Editing is so important because we aren't perfect, especially when trying to put our vision into the written word. Regardless of if you're penning a song, a text book or a work of fiction, no one ever gets it right during their first draft. But there in lies the beauty of writing: we mind-dump and brainstorm our initial ideas, and then can spend time afterwards rewording, reordering and overall polishing what we've written so that when the intended audience gets the chance to read it, it's brilliant! 

Of course, it's subjective as to how many times a piece of writing requires editing, and we can leave that discussion for another time, however as I mentioned above, the golden rule is to give yourself and the work a 'breather' before you attack it with a red pen. 

Why Should I Take A Break Before Editing?

Simple! When you're so entrenched in a project, you can become completely blinded by the little mistakes, because you're focusing on the bigger picture. Don't misunderstand- that's absolutely perfectly fine! After all, in the first draft, we want to be shooting for the stars and producing content which is uninhibited as much as possible. That's the idea behind of the concept of 'free-writing' and NaNoWiMo: where, for a certain length of time, you don't stop writing whatever is coming out of your head, in order to overcome self-imposed mental barriers. But then, when it comes to essential editing, you want a fresh pair of your eyes; and this is only achieved by revisiting your manuscript after a break.

Edit Your Own Work First!

Naturally, people may be tempted to just give a first draft straight to another person or pay an editor, but my personal opinion is you should always review your own work first yourself before giving someone else a raw file. This is because your project is your personal vision and only you truly understand its concept and direction at that point; so to give it to someone else at such an early stage could tarnish or misconstrue the work's direction and 'spirit', because your third party editor will interpret the body of work differently to you from your rough draft, and edit it accordingly. What you get back may be not what you ever intended and could end up wasting everyone's time. It's best to look over your own work first to get it out of first draft status before giving it to someone else.

Take A Break From Your Work

So the point is: always edit your own work in the first round, and when doing so, give yourself some distance from the project before you do. How you use this break is up to you; some people may start a new book, work on something completely different, start designing the cover art, read, or stop writing altogether for a while (which I wouldn't recommend, but each to their own!). But the point is, through this distance, when you come to edit the writing after a sufficient amount of time, you will be in a far better position to see the flaws and the errors that you would otherwise have missed, simply because at the time of writing, you were too heavily invested.

The time apart will mean that you will have forgotten a lot of the intricacies of the project and can therefore view it more as a first-time reader than an author, which is advantageous for you in first draft editing.

We've All Been There!

We see it all of the time: when someone has been writing, for example, a report for weeks and then they say they've checked it 100 times, only for you to find they've spelled their name incorrectly at the very start! Or the age-old author adage: "I wrote all day and hated everything I wrote and decided I was a terrible writer, only to reread it the next day and realise it wasn't that bad." We've all been there. But it acts as evidence to support the need to take a break before editing. 

Distance Is Paramount 

We're only human and we get too bogged down in things to be able to edit our own work straight away. So next time you finish your poem, your manuscript, your assignment or your white paper, allow for some time to pass, take a breather, allow the work (and your mind) to "cool off", and only then should you reach for the editing cap to give it a good scrub.

After this, then you may decide to give it to a third party, but only once you're happy that you have the project complete and in a solid state before you do so. 

Any comments or feedback? What's your process?

Christopher

Melotti Media

www.melottimedia.com.au