For something I dislike – I sure write about it a lot, but that is because I spend most of my time doing it.
I hope one day we can become friends, but right now, I hate editing’s guts!
I am seriously so over editing – it hurts, because every time I reread a document I find a new mistake or feel the need to change something. Even these blog posts; I will look back on past posts and find mistakes.
Most, I can pick up on and amend before I publish a post, but some will slip through, because after reading a document a number of times, the objectivity leaves you.
Your mind knows what you want to say and your eyes deceive you.
Still, a 1,000 word blog post edit is completely different to a 70,000 word book edit though.
Take my debut novel Broken.
I had, had my book professionally edited twice and it had been proofread. It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. I had decided it would be a good idea to reread my book one more time, to make sure I was completely happy with it, because of course I want to offer the readers of my book, the best possible read through that I can, not to lose their flow when they keep stumbling over silly mistakes, like missed words or grammatical errors.
I was confident I could read it once and I would be done. WRONG!
Now, this book is a 72,000 word document and on a very fast read through I could read it in four hours, but I also needed to check for mistakes, so I had to be thorough.
I knew it was going to be very time consuming, but I didn’t realise how much time, because I found mistakes, lots of teeny, tiny mistakes.
Every time I found one and changed it, I knew I would have to read the whole document again.It takes a very long time to read 72,000 words and even longer to read it again and again.
I was beginning to feel very desperate. I had a deadline.
I wanted to release this book before the end of the year, 4 weeks away, sooner if I could help it and I was still stuck in the mire of editing, when I should have been preparing it for self-publishing and marketing.
I read it four times in four days.
I was ready to give up, admit defeat and wait for the new year to start again, but then I found, out of pure desperation, another way to edit my book and pick up those small niggly mistakes.
This is a hack for anyone who is a newbie writer or who has a ton of editing to do on a document and is getting nowhere fast.
When you are at that point where you are about to destroy your lap top in frustration or perhaps, even, possibly, contemplating giving up writing for good.
Try this instead:
READ ALOUD FUNCTION – my saviour!
I decided to try the ‘read aloud’ function on my word document.
Honestly, it destroyed the essence of the story, the feelings and emotions that I poured into the story were lost in the monotone voice and I hated having to listen to it again and again in that annoying droll tone.
But, it found the mistakes because I wasn’t enjoying it, I wasn’t swept along in the flow and because I was ‘reading’ the book in a different way to before; my mind wasn’t on autopilot and it picked up a number of easily overlooked mistakes: endings missing on words, similar but wrong word used and missed commas.
I started slow and the first two read throughs were painful, but it had to be done, because I could see I was now making progress and there were less mistakes.
The last proofread, I sped up the voice and it was a two hour read through with no mistakes. (That is to say: there could be some, but, none that I could pick up on).
Once I had a read through with no mistakes, it was ready for formatting to Kindle and the rest is history or in a different blog post!