Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: A Clear Second Look

If you're like me, you've heard this advice  time and time again.  Once you've finished a piece of writing, you need to set it aside for a while so you can take a clear second look at it.  This is excellent advice, advice I often give to my clients and students ... but it's advice that writers often don't follow (myself included).

My house is crazy-busy most days, and writing time is something I grab where I can during the week.  Weekends are a bit better, but between the laundry, baking, and general household chores that need to be done, I still don't get as much writing time in as I'd like.  This leads to a very time-starved kind of writing, where I'm scrambling to meet deadlines.

I start out with the best of intentions, but sometimes life just interferes.  This week, for example, my writing time has been limited because the youngest (of the broken arm) isn't cleared for outside activities until at least April 23rd, which means no afternoon daycare until at least then.  And without afternoon daycare, and with an increasingly stir-crazy four-year-old, I can honestly say I'm not getting much of anything done unless it's late at night after everything else is done.  Everything I've written this weekend (including this blog post) has depended on my clear second look hack.  Let's take a look, shall we?

A clear second look for the time-starved writer

If I know I'm going to have to edit almost in medias res, I do everything I can to have one writing session first thing in the morning (that's 5:30 around here ... ugh) and another after supper.  This leaves me close to 12 hours between writing sessions.  I'm not going to catch as much as I would if I had days or weeks to put my project aside and then come back to it, but I think I do a fairly good job following this method, and I think you'll be amazed at what you find, even using this time-crunched technique.

1. Split your writing / editing time into two sessions, with at least four hours between chunks.
2. Go do something that's not writing-related in the time between sessions.
3. When you're ready to edit, here's what you're going to do:
1. Print your project off and grab a highlighter or two. (I usually use two colours, one for errors and one for flow.)
2. Read your project aloud (to yourself, the dog, the cat, your imaginary friend ... doesn't matter who.  Just do it.  No cheating!)
4. As you're reading:
1. Highlight any grammatical, spelling, capitalization, and technical style errors.
2. Highlight any passages where flow is off.  These are places where transitions between sentences, ideas, and paragraphs don't quite work, and where characters might be doing one thing, then suddenly veer off in another direction.  
5. Take your marked copy back to the computer and make the necessary changes and revisions.  
6. Repeat the reading aloud process (steps 3 & 4) once more.
7. Cross your fingers that you've caught everything.  ;-)
8. Submit!