Editing: An Update and Experience

This week, I’m going to give a bit of an update, but also just talk about the general experience Kristin and I are having since receiving our first ever professional edit on our manuscript, The Visionary.

Just as a refresher on where we’re at in the journey of getting Visionary published, somewhere around mid-September, Kristin and I started to get fed up with trying to break through the querying process of agents and decided we’d have better luck with self-publishing. I think it’s lessening some, but there does seem to be a kind of stigma with authors self-publishing their works. Granted though, there are several benefits we weighed in deciding this might be a better way to go: 1) You retain all rights to your own work, as well as any money you might make from selling it, 2) You have more freedom to write whatever you want without being subject to agents chasing trends or weighing marketability, 3) We figured that if we published our manuscript ourselves, then we could ensure that any effort put into making it a published book would be done to the best of our ability and any success or lack thereof would be entirely on our efforts. Not to say traditional publishing might not have worked out for us eventually, but the process is very time-consuming and seems, in our opinion, subject to the whims of whatever’s trending at the moment. We just felt like self-publishing might be a better bet for us, and it seems that so far it has been.

Weirdly enough once we decided to go for publishing our book ourselves, things started to happen really quickly, which seemed wild after several months of querying with mixed results. Within the first real week of working on the self-publishing process, we had booked a professional editor and a cover artist for Visionary, as we figured these were the first two largest things we needed to take care of (and the ones that might take the longest).

Kristin and I felt like we had a pretty good grasp on our grammar and formatting, but we needed a new set of eyes on it that were used to looking for the things a finished book might have that we didn’t know about or needed to polish. I’m not going to lie, getting a professional editor is kind of expensive, but luckily, we were able to find one that was affordable, well-rated, extremely nice, and did an extensive job reviewing Visionary. We actually went for an editor that did Middle Grade and YA books, which I think really helped since Visionary could technically fall into either category. Also, we tend to use a goofier style of humor in the story, which might be more common in middle grade, and the edit might have gone a completely different way if we’d gotten an editor who didn’t care for that style.

So, in our editing package, we got three types of edits: copy, stylistic, and developmental. This means that our editor did a full proofread of Visionary, critiquing things that needed work with grammar, formatting, etc. Next, our editor went through everything structurally to make sure things made sense plot-wise, making sure our tone and voicing remained the same, and then checked over everything as it developed plot-wise and character-wise. Essentially, she was checking to make sure everything made sense as written, seemed to play out in a plausible way, and was formatted and written correctly. Ultimately though, her job was to determine if Visionary was publication ready.

About the first of October, we received the finished edit back, along with some extremely nice commentary from the editor. This was a little intimidating, as we didn’t have a clue whether or not she would like our story, but it seemed she found it enjoyable. As you can imagine, a freak out ensued between Kristin and me since a real, professional editor told us our story was good and- shockingly- was publication ready, beyond the few changes she suggested to us to make.

We both looked through her initial comments, though we did pause briefly to get the Thanksgiving holidays over with before we started in on a full review of the edit. When we got our edit back, our editor sent us four documents: a developmental edit sheet where she laid out larger considerations and comments for the story as a whole, a document showing any edits she made to formatting, grammar, and comments on places she wanted us to work on, a clean version of the tracked changes document, and a reference guide she had made to help her clients.

The first thing Kristin and I did when we began reviewing the feedback for the professional edit was to look over the larger considerations on the developmental edit sheet so we could keep them fresh in our mind as we moved forward. We did fix a few of them if we could, but we decided it would probably be better to go through the comments on the document first since those were smaller changes. We decided that once we got through the smaller adjustments, we’d tackle these bigger considerations since they might require more time and thought to work out.

I’m going to give all you writers out there a piece of advice right now. Learn to describe facial expressions and body language. It’s kind of hilarious, but Kristin and I must just very rarely have allotted time for specific descriptions for reactions and body movement. Not to say we don’t ever describe faces or movement, but I don’t think we were hitting those descriptors on moments where they could help effectively aid a scene. For instance, you could use a facial expression to aide something funny or convey more emotion, same with body language. In the same way, our editor suggested adding more internal commentary at certain scenes to also help aid in that reaction or description of feelings. I think it’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of suggestions we’ve come across in the 15+ chapters we’ve reviewed thus far have been working on these three points.

Though it’s kind of a pain to sit there and go, “Okay, so how would you describe this kind of reaction?”, it’s still been extremely helpful to getting us to think in a more descriptive way. Kristin’s already sworn that before we get Visionary’s sequel edited, we’re going to have to go through the whole thing and specially make sure we’re giving our characters the kind of reaction time they deserve.

Another thing we’ve run into a couple times is we accidentally committed the mortal sin of telling rather than showing. Gasp. I know. We’re terrible. The good thing is, we’ve only had to correct this one a few times, but honestly, I think having it pointed out is helping me recognize where to see when we’re slipping into that telling territory, rather than describing.

One clue- and I’m going to tell on myself because I’m 90% sure I’m the one that did this- is not to write something like “He looked confused.” Now you’d think that’d be a fairly self-explanatory sentence, but I think it’s really easy to not think about saying something like that when you’re writing. Kristin also pointed out that saying something like “I could see…” is also slipping into that telling mind frame, just wording it a different way.

I don’t think we’ve run into a ton of suggestions to fix that have appeared as often as those four, but Kristin and I are only about sixteen chapters into reviewing the edit. Some generals we’ve had to watch are slimming down scenes that might go on a bit too long, or ensuring there’s character movement so it doesn’t seem like people are stuck in one place during a scene. If there’s another writing consideration that seems to pop up a lot as we move forward, we can always make another blog about it in the future. In fact, we might have enough to make another one of how to go about those larger changes once we get through all the smaller edits.

Getting a professional edit was extremely helpful- not only for assuring us of our story’s solidity, but also for pointing out where we might need to reconsider things or have writing weaknesses. Still though, there is one last thing to address when talking about reviewing a professional edit. An editor is acting on their knowledge of grammar and story and experience, and we got a ton of helpful feedback from her that I think will make Visionary an even better story. One thing to keep in mind though is that an editor might not always know all the elements at work within your story, and there may be times where you might need to take their advice under consideration but might end up having to decide against the changes they suggest.

For example, if there’s an element of your story that’s a set-up for later, then an editor suggests lessening that or losing it, you might be in a bit of a sticky situation. In that scenario though, you have more information than the editor does, so you might have to weigh their advice versus what you’re trying to do.

I think the best advice for that situation is to fully consider what the editor is suggesting, but don’t get too caught up in following their advice to the letter. You have to best work out how to take their feedback and make your story better.

All in all, Kristin and I had a very good experience with our editor, and we hope we’ll be able to work with her again in the future. Her advice has been extremely helpful in getting us to think like better writers. We’ll keep you all updated as we move forward through the editing process. We’re about halfway through at the moment, not counting the larger considerations we’ll have to go back to once we get the little stuff taken care of. After we get through everything, the plan is to do another full read of the whole manuscript and see how all the new changes work.

Thanks for reading. Write on.

-Kamryn