I’ve written a great story. It plays out in my head like it was being directed by the Coen brothers or, hey, Steven Spielberg at his finest. I can’t wait to show it to someone so they can tell me how great it is.
Sound familiar? I can certainly recall sometimes thinking along those lines back when I first ventured out into the world to put my deeply personal creations on display. When I finished the first complete draft of my first novel after years of picking it up, and then putting it away once again, I was stoked. I could read it line for line while the movie played synchronously in my mind, in living color, choreographed, while the orchestrations echoed in my ears through the joys and pains captured in every scene.
But, in spite of my euphoria, was I really ready to receive a critique? Kathy took my manuscript away for a while and then sent it back with page after page of barbed criticisms dipped in curare – or, so it seemed at the time. I was disheartened. I took those pages, buried them where they would never be seen, and then walked away from the project – for a while.
I learned from that experience. I learned that I was not ready to be critiqued – and that I didn’t even know it. I also learned that I had not yet developed the ability to separate what was in my head from what was on the page. In other words, I read what I imagined and not what I had written.
As it turned out, walking away from the manuscript was one of the critical steps on the road to preparing myself to be critiqued. It gave me time to reflect upon my motives, my intentions, and on the details of what I had written. It also gave me the time to research what was necessary to be ready for a critique by reading books and articles on craft and editing and practicing what I’d learned – which, you may ask, was what?
Distance: Walk away from a finished draft and give yourself the time to detach and forget. Some authors have reported taking anywhere from a day or two for a short piece, to as much as a week, month, or even a year away from a novel in order to develop those fresh eyes necessary to distinguish your written reality from your imagination.
Fresh Read: With those dutifully earned fresh eyes, take the time to read your piece, preferably aloud, from start to finish with a pencil and tablet handy. Write notes on your manuscript and overall suggestions and impressions on your tablet. You should not get sidetracked by mechanics like spelling, grammar, and punctuation on this step but be concerned with readability, development, flow, and the logical progression of events.
Listen: When you read your draft aloud while doing a fresh read you are allowing your voice, by forcing pronunciation, to discover some of what your eyes miss. When you allow yourself to be read to, while scanning the text at the same time, you are forcing even more cognition by establishing a link between what you see and what you hear.
Rewrite: After your fresh-eyed review use your notes and undertake a rewrite of any weak, misunderstood, incongruous, or inconsistent passages. When this is complete you may want to repeat these beginning steps, as deemed appropriate. Many writers, including myself, replay these steps several times.
Self-edit: You’ve taken the time to read through your manuscript, undertook some rewriting, and are feeling pretty good that things are tracking well. Okay then, it’s time to look at those annoying facets like spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It’s not that you haven’t been finding and correcting these all along, as I do. It’s just that in this pass all you want to concern yourself with is the fundamental mechanics in a line-by-line edit of the entire manuscript.
I believe that, while editing is indeed a profession, self-editing is an art that can be learned by all writers to improve the quality of their work. I also believe that all writers should study the art of self-editing because, for no other reason then, it will cause them to become better writers. To that end, some very good books on self-editing (that I can personally recommend) include:
Self-editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, Renni Browne and Dave King
The Artful Edit: On the practice of editing yourself, Susan Bell
Revision and Self-Editing for Publication: Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Novel That Sells, James Scott Bell
It is disconcerting and disappointing to the seeker of a critique and the critiquer to be asked to review a first draft, which is always a rough draft. The critiquer should not be distracted by errors in the mechanics or subjected to sentences or passages that do not seem to move anywhere or mean anything. By following the simple prescription outlined above an author can submit for critique, a piece that is ready for critique, and receive back from the critiquer some pertinent advice for strengthening their writing.
Samuel Thomas Nichols
