Tag: editing tips

Is Self-Editing a Waste of Time?

You’re not perfect. Nobody is.

Meg Dowell1 Comment

What’s more tiring, frustrating, and confidence-crushing than writing? Self-editing, of course.

Some of us barely tolerate it. Others can’t get away from their cringeworthy first drafts fast enough.

There are many reasons why we don’t like looking over our own work. Early writers especially struggle to reread their writing without wanting to toss their laptops out the window. Often, it’s a time issue. You sit down, you write a blog post — you only have so much time to do all that, and self-editing, if you’re unhappy with the way something’s turned out, could end in a complete rewrite.

So the question is: is self-editing a waste of time? Is it worth the frustration, embarrassment, and pain?

After all, at some point, an editor’s going to pick up what you’ve written and do the hard part for you. Right?

If you’ve ever worked professionally with an editor, you know this isn’t the case. I’ve yet to work with an editor that hasn’t dished out the request that we “proofread our work before submitting it.” Editors are there to fix easy-to-miss mistakes, and in some cases, to help you improve the structure and flow of a piece. They aren’t there to fix errors that SpellCheck could have picked up — and they’re definitely not going to spend the time cleaning up a first draft that you haven’t even bothered to read over at least once.

Is there such thing as wasting valuable time while editing your work? Of course. I’ve caught myself a handful of times fixing and rewriting things that didn’t need altering in the first place. Granted, I’m also a chronic perfectionist, and if I let myself, I’d rewrite every single thing I ever wrote in an unnecessary attempt to make it “better.” If you’re the same way, you have to approach this process with care.

Editing your own work is difficult, and spending too much time pouring over a draft can have its downsides. But this doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, look over your work before you submit it. It doesn’t mean you can’t revise and rewrite on your own after you’ve taken a brief step back from your first draft. It just means that working alone almost never works. Why do you think there’s the occasional typo in these posts? It’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because my own eyes can only catch so many of my own mistakes, no matter how many times I reread a post (which, honestly, rarely exceeds 1.5).

Self-editing will not catch everything. It’s often a struggle to look at your project as a whole body of work, because you’re scrutinizing your own words so carefully. But it will often catch the most obvious errors, like leaving out a word, writing the same word twice, or forgetting a hyperlink. Multiple editors have told me to read my work out loud, and that helps tremendously. Hearing your words, instead of skimming over them, sometimes helps you rephrase things, connect thoughts together, and improve the structure of whatever you’re writing.

So, back to our original question: is self-editing a waste of time? It can be, if you start obsessing over creating the perfect draft. There is no such thing. This is why editors exist, even if you don’t have one yet. It’s literally their job to fix your mistakes and help you polish an imperfect piece. Self-edit at least once, maybe twice if you make changes. But don’t go crazy before passing your work off to someone who (hopefully) gets paid to really look at it in detail.

Don’t have an editor? Most aspiring writers don’t. I have several for my Cheat Sheet articles, but when I write this blog, I’m on my own. All I can do is my best. If I had an extra hour to edit my posts more carefully, I would. But the truth is, I don’t. You learn to turn the things you hate into habits, and you learn to move through these habits as effectively and efficiently as possible. Do I like reading over my work? No. But I do it, because it’s very important to me that you’re getting the highest quality reads possible every single day.

Learn to tolerate it. Someday, you might have an editor there to comb through your draft. But for right now, do the best you can. Even though people on the internet love to point out the smallest flaws in our work for some reason, no one’s judging you THAT severely on whether or not you’re perfect. If they are, well, they’re just not nice. Is an error-free blog post more professional? Of course it is. But come on. We’re only human here.

If you’re struggling with self-editing, this post might help. It has a novel-writing angle, but the tips can really apply to any kind of work, whether it’s fiction or not.

Meg is the creator of Novelty Revisions, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words. She is a freelance writer and a nine-time NaNoWriMo winner with work published in Teen Ink, Success Story, Lifehack and USA TODAY College. Follow Meg on Twitter for tweets about writing, food and nerdy things.

Help Novelty Revisions become a more valuable resource for aspiring writers.

Join now.

How to (Strategically) Self-Publish a Book

Meg Dowell1 Comment

blog1220

It’s more than just writing, editing, uploading and posting a link on Twitter.

Writing a book is an amazing feat. If you’re thinking of trying out the self-publishing route, there is, believe it or not, a strategy to it. You’re not going to sell very many copies of your latest masterpiece if it’s poorly written, haphazardly designed or not promoted at all.

Here are a few self-publishing tips, and links to some of our other resources, to help you start working toward some of your 2016 writing/publishing goals!

Write, rewrite, edit, share with a friend

The first step to self-publishing is obviously writing the book you’re going to distribute online. Which is hard enough. But just because you don’t have to jump through traditional publishing hoops doesn’t mean you should put any less effort into producing the best book possible.

Take the time to not only write a great first draft, but also to edit, revise and recruit a friend or two to read and give you honest feedback. Here are a few self-editing tips to help you get started.

Find the self-publishing platform that works for you

If you have ever started the self-publishing process to get a free proof copy of your book to edit on paper, your best bet is to use that same platform, the one you’re most familiar with, to actually go through the entire process when you’re ready to publish your book. You can shop around all you want, but sticking with the platform you know works, and seeing how it goes the first time around, will save you time.

Platforms like CreateSpace do a lot of the formatting for you as you’re putting together your book, if you’re not quite as experienced in the book design department. You also have the option to design, via templates or on your own, in whatever way you want.

Check out our review of CreateSpace.

Build up to your release

Don’t just toss your book on the market and say, “Hey, look what I did!” Part of marketing your work is getting your potential readers excited about what’s yet to come. Your friends and family will (hopefully) be totally on board, but you might have a decent social media following – and they might be interested in your latest project, too.

Set up a group or email list to invite those interested in your book to receive updates leading up to your book’s release. Share excerpts and even let them help you with some of the smaller decisions, like designing your cover or picking a name, if you want.

Get more tips on how to promote your work strategically.

Even if you give self-publishing a try and it doesn’t work out the way you expected, at least you took the time to practice the various steps of the process and started to narrow down your target market. We wish you the best – happy writing!

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

When Is It Okay to Edit As You Write?

Meg Dowell1 Comment

blog0924

We’ve all been there. You sit down to write a few hundred words and end up spending your designated writing time making edits on parts of your story you’ve already written and set aside. Usually, in the writing world, this is discouraged. But not always, and not for everyone.

So when IS it okay to edit as you go?

If you’ve finished A LOT of writing projects before

You’ll hear, if you haven’t already, a lot of experts say you absolutely should not edit until you’ve finished writing. We’ve even given you tips on how to avoid it. This is relevant advice for two kinds of writers: beginners and procrastinators. It does not apply to more experienced writers the exact same way.

When you’re first starting out, the most important thing is to sit down and write. Finishing a story, regardless of the type, is hard. Once you get past that first hurdle, it gets a little easier each time you do it. The more you write, the more trained you are to be able to go back and edit as you write without having to worry so much about murdering your productivity.

If you just need to add a detail you’re afraid you’ll forget

Continuity is not the easiest thing to maintain when you’re working on a longer writing project, especially if you don’t write a story in chronological order. Every once in awhile you’ll realize, in the middle of writing, that the newest addition to your plot doesn’t quite match something small, but significant, that you’ve already written.

It’s okay to go back and do your best to make a quick revision, to make sure you remember it needs to be fixed. You can also mark or highlight it, without actually fixing it, or make some kind of note next to it to remind yourself to make the edit during revisions.

If you absolutely cannot move on until you do

If you’ve ever stopped in the middle of doing something important to send a quick text or answer an email—because you’re too distracted to finish what you’re doing before stopping to do something else—you know what it must be like to not be able to write anything new until you’ve gone back to fix something in a different part of the story that’s already been written.

Overall, the most important thing to do, as a writer, is write words. If going back to edit something you just remembered needs fixing is the only thing that’s going to clear your head and free up your brain for new ideas, just do it. But don’t abandon the task at hand to spend too much time on small, minute details you can fix in the revisions stage of the writing process. Later.

Either you love editing, or you don’t. A lot of times we end up spending more time on it than we mean to, instead of actually writing. It’s not always a writing “sin,” but always keep your end goal—finishing your story—in mind.

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

Five Stress-Free Steps to Revising Your Novel

Meg Dowell9 Comments

blog06142

So you’ve written a book. Cue the confetti!

After you’ve cleaned all that up, and after you give yourself time away from your story (some recommend months—take as little or as much time as you need) to be able to come back with a fresh perspective.

Then, it’s time to revise. Some love it. Some hate it. Some just don’t know how to approach it without an overwhelming sense of dread and regret.

We have steps. Stress-free ones. It’s not as scary as you think.

For the purpose of this post, let’s assume you’re planning on going the traditional route, meaning you won’t actually self-publish. Let’s also assume you’re using Microsoft Word to house and edit your drafts. 

Step 1: Self-Publish a Proof Copy

So you might be thinking, excuse me? If I’m going to take the time to create and order a proof copy of my own book that no one else is ever going to see, why not just self-publish and be done with it?

Debates about self-publishing aside, the purpose of a proof copy is to make the early stages of your revisions feel less like work and more like a (hopefully) good read.

You can order a proof copy of your book for pretty cheap using CreateSpace, and if you don’t want to take the time to create an elaborate cover and format your own work, you really don’t have to. Again—no one else will see it unless you want them to.

Step 2: Read and Take Notes

If you prefer reading physical hard-copy books over e-books, that’s where the benefit of the physical proof copy comes in. But you can still implement this step if you’re just staring at your screen reading through your draft.

The key here is to read your book from start to finish, like you would a normal book. You can either mark things as you go or take notes on the side, but the point is to undergo a complete read-through to evaluate your overall work. Breaking it into pieces is easier when you’re able to identify weak points and major flaws.

Step 3: Open a New Document

Hear us out before you panic (remember, stress-free!). What you can try to do, if you’re having trouble breaking up your work, is to take small sections of your novel, one at a time, from your original draft, copy them and paste them into a new place.

Isolating the pieces one by one can help you feel less overwhelmed and make the task at hand seem much more manageable, especially if you’re trying to meet a deadline and can’t afford to procrastinate.

Alternative method: color-code your text. Choose one color for sections you’re editing, and color them white when you’re done with them. (Out of sight, out of stress?)

Step 4: Start with Grammar and Spelling

If you read through your book in its entirety and take notes along the way before making any changes, it’s possible you’ve already marked most of those pesky punctuation mix-ups and embarrassing misspellings.

For some, this is the easiest part of revising, and doing it first can fuel your motivation and self-boost your confidence when it comes time to editing for content. Do be aware, also, that spelling and grammar checkers don’t catch everything. 

Step 5: Be Mindful When Editing for Clarity and Content

The advantage of working with an editor is that they’re paid to make sure your book doesn’t just look nice, but that it also makes sense. They are able to see things you might not, like small plot holes and characters going by multiple first names unintentionally.

That being said, try not to make any big changes based on how you feel the book presents itself—if you’ve already finished and just aren’t feeling confident.

We really are our own worst critics. You want to show up with as authentic of a draft as possible—meaning it’s ready for review even if it’s not quite ready for publishing. Something you thought about taking out, but didn’t, could end up being the best part of the entire work (let’s be honest). If you can, wait for someone else to give an opinion before you change the story itself.

No matter the length and initial quality of your book, revising a full-length work—the revisions that come before you’re even ready to show it to someone else, like a potential agent—is a big job. While it’s important to celebrate and give yourself time to recharge, revisions have the potential to seriously “up” your publishing potential.

Take it slow. Be patient. Relax—you’ve made it this far. There’s no turning back now.

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

Are You Constantly Revising Your Work As You Write It? Here’s How to Stop

Meg Dowell4 Comments

blog43

The train that carries your ideas from the realm of thought into physical words is easily derailed. Everything easily distracts you, even in the middle of writing a good paragraph. Unfortunately, you can act as your own distractions without realizing it.

Whether we try to or not, writers get pretty good at editing and proofreading over time. Maybe too good. So good we find ourselves hitting backspace and rewriting less-than-flawless sentences, in the middle of those otherwise great paragraphs, because we’re so set on tweaking them until they sparkle.

This is a devastating distraction that can take away from your writing-related productivity. Once you’re aware you’re succumbing to it—do you know how to overcome it?

Here’s how to hold off the urge to revise every paragraph you write, long enough to allow yourself to make more progress on your current project.

Turn off Spelling and Grammar Check

Working on papers, presentations and resumes, those red and green lines are life-savers, and effective for quick fixes so you don’t forget to go back and mend a huge error in your work. Working on your own writing, those same indicators are not only distracting, but can tempt you even further to stop what you’re doing to “fix” what you’ve just written.

When you’re writing something no one else will see (yet), turn off Word’s spelling and grammar check function. You’re much less likely to stop in the middle of what you’re doing to fix the errors it points out to you. Don’t forget to turn it back on when you’re ready to revise!

Don’t Scroll Up

Or flip the page back, if you’re still cool enough to write in a notebook (we might be jealous). When you really get into writing a scene, it’s actually easy to lose your bearings. Sometimes you have to scroll up and reread what you’ve just done, to better figure out where you need to go next.

Try your best not to go back and reread, at least in excess. If you’re sprinting, don’t worry about getting a character’s name wrong or forgetting a small side plot detail. Editing those things comes later, and the more you avoid focusing on those small mistakes now, the closer you’ll get to the editing stage of your project.

Be Patient

No matter where you stand in your writing career, you are going to make mistakes. Big ones; small ones; ones you won’t notice until someone else points them out to you for the first time. Worrying about every little thing, and wanting your first draft to be as close to perfect as possible, only takes away from the work you’re doing in this moment.

Focus on your story—your characters, dialogue, getting through your current scene without going fictionally insane—anything but what you need to go back and do later. It’s okay to make notes to yourself, or highlight certain passages so you remember you want to return to them later. But that’s the key word here: later. For now, take your work a page at a time.

We all have an “inner editor” trying to take control of that idea-stocked train before it produces much of anything worth incorporating into a final draft. It’s normal. When it comes time to edit, that part of our brains becomes our most treasured companion. Until then, we have to do all we can to keep our minds on the task at hand, and leave those much-needed revisions for another day.

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

How Editing Helps Refine the Skill of Writing

Meg Dowell1 Comment

blog331

There is a reason the best creative writing instructors form peer review groups. A student joins a class to “learn how to write better,” usually not realizing that in order to “be better,” you have to put your own notebook down and look over someone else’s.

The key to successful writing is remembering there is always room to improve; you can always become a better writer than you think you are right now. Refining that skill is a life-long process, and stepping out of your role as a writer and playing the part of an editor is one way to keep your mind ahead of your hands.

Here are three ways editing makes us better writers.

Awareness of Common Errors (and How to Fix Them)

When we limit ourselves to staring at page after page of our own writing, we start to gloss over the common style and even grammar mistakes we make. The one and only downside of reading professionally published writing is that you’re seeing the finished product, after it has been picked apart and reconstructed maybe six or seven times. All you see is the (hopefully) error-free work, and it’s easy to forget no piece of writing starts out that way.

Almost more effective than having someone else point out these shortcomings, seeing someone else make similar mistakes broadens our editorial lens and helps us to recognize common mistakes when we return to our own projects.

Shifting the Focus Off Our Own Work

Writing an original piece, whether it’s an article, short story, poem or full-length novel, is enough of a roller coaster. Going back and staring at the same paragraphs over and over again is like an elevated straightaway, then a downward plunge, then a slow climb—and repeat.

Editing our own work gets very old; exciting; then it drags us hopelessly along, either leaving us thinking we’re good enough to get published or we should just trash the thing now and start over. Taking time to close out our own documents and give our exhausted brains and eyes something new to look at is not only refreshing and motivating, but also beneficial for both the editor and writer.

Experiencing the Other Side of Criticism

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been writing, how many pieces you have or haven’t published, how many times you have or haven’t been rejected: taking criticism is hard. Every writer wants to believe the time and effort they’re putting into their work is making a difference, and when someone hands back a draft with corrections and suggestions clogging the margins, it’s discouraging. Often motivating, but still disappointing.

Probably the best way to learn how to handle criticism from someone else is to practice dishing it out yourself. Taking the time to read someone else’s work and practice giving feedback the way you would want someone to give it to you serves as a much-needed reminder that constructive criticism is literally in an editor’s job description, and you might be a great writer, but you’ll never be perfect.

Writing is hard; editing is harder. You won’t make it very far in your career if you try to maintain one without the other. Balance your writing with editing others’ work, and sometimes without even realizing it, your skills in both areas will improve quickly. It’s worth your time; you might even find you like it.

Image courtesy of Novel Revisions.

The Difference Between a “Proofreader” and an Editor

Meg DowellLeave a comment

blog330

I recently applied for a part-time job proofreading academic papers. It would not help me pay off my student loans any faster (sigh), and the position does not extend beyond turning on Word’s TrackChanges feature to make anonymous suggestions in a vibrant color of my choosing (pink is preferable, obviously).

The opportunity intrigued me, enough to spend three hours on a Sunday completing a test proof, for two reasons.

One, because I would not mind doing my own research and/or becoming a professor someday, both of which involve familiarity with academic writing style, format and the ability to critique in something other than red pen.

Two, I am, when I am not working or sleeping on trains or tossing and turning trying to come up with new topics to post here, an editor; sometimes the “art of proofreading” gets lost in the shuffle. I need balance. I need to exercise my hypersensitive grammar-correcting muscles.

If you’re not an editor already, you might not know the difference between someone who proofreads in their spare time and someone who bears the title of Editor on their bottom-of-the-wallet business cards (no judgment: I don’t even have any, and not because potential colleagues have taken them all). There is, in fact, a difference.

The biggest variance: it takes a degree in English and the ability to flip through a style guide to proofread a paper. It takes a lot more than that to be an editor.

A lot more.

A Proofreader Reads; an Editor Analyzes

This is not to say a proofreader doesn’t critique content for understanding and flow. I’ll keep using an academic paper as an example. If a paper doesn’t make sense to a random grammar guru, it won’t make sense to a professor or committee or another random specimen on the Internet.

Simply, an editor takes this process a step further by examining what, for example, an article is saying, what it means, what it means to the person writing it, and what it should mean to the audience it is intended for. This takes breaking a larger piece up into smaller parts (think of it in terms of cooking). A proofreader hovers on the surface of this process; an editor dives in headfirst, with no life jacket.

A Proofreader Makes Suggestions; an Editor Sets Goals

Something I struggled with when I first started out as an editor with College Lifestyles was giving consistent feedback to the same writers over an extended period of time. At that point I was hardly used to critiquing my roommate’s papers without ripping them apart insensibly, let alone helping someone improve their writing skills from week to week. An editor can’t just crank out a string of TrackChanges and expect that to make a difference on its own.

I am probably a bit obsessed with setting goals (yes, there used to be a Bucket List here; yes, it started getting a little personal and is now tucked away safely in a more secure location, insert sad violin music), and I probably drive my writers deeper into insanity by making them set their own, but being that motivator is what makes the change. It’s not in a proofreader’s job description to do that. There’s just not room. 

A Proofreader Keeps It Professional; an Editor Gets Personal

Read the rest of this section before you start freaking out. “Getting personal” does not imply breaking the barrier of a professional relationship between editor and writer. Working with people my age, sometimes it gets hard not to break down that wall, but for the sake of productivity, you have to keep it there.

By “getting personal,” I am of course referring to the art of seeing a piece as the product of someone else’s extended thought and effort. Through the eyes of a proofreader, a paper is a piece of academic thought written for academic minds to process. To an editor, a piece breathes. It has substance beyond black-and-white content. Because you’re bound to have even if only a slightly closer connection with a writer than a proofreader does with a client, you can, and should, recognize and highlight the traits of the writer that come alive in their work. This is beneificial for all sorts of reasons, which I’ll have to touch on in another post because I’m nearing PTL (post too long) status here. Sorry.

I’m promising here an upcoming post on how editing others’ work improves our own ability to write and critique ourselves. In the meantime, if you see an opportunity to edit—even if it’s just a friend saying, “Hey, can you look at this? It’s a mess”—grab that opportunity like it’s the only one you’ll ever have.

Your first “gig” doesn’t have to be paid or even official. As of this moment, I have only ever been paid to copyedit for a student paper. I have not been paid a cent for my work as en editor. Yet I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything vital to my future success as a professional (maybe?).

Get into the habit of moving beyond marking up a page with a pen, no matter how small the task.

Editing goes deeper than catching spelling and grammar mistakes. In my opinion, it is one of the toughest, most well-rounded, most rewarding jobs you can score as a young adult. Insert idea for another post here.

Stop this madness. Go edit something. Edit the heart and soul out of this post, if you want. Do it. Do it.

Do it.

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

A recent graduate with a B.A. in English and a completed major in nutrition, currently seeking a graduate degree in health communication, Meg is a twenty-something workaholic with a passion for writing, coffee and dietetics. In addition to her status as an aspiring novelist and Grammar Nazi (and the mastermind behind this site), Meg is an editor for College Lifestyles magazine and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine’s Stone Soup.  She is a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner and has written several creative pieces for Teen Ink magazine. Follow Meg on Twitter.

 

How Editing Is Like Making a Pizza

Meg DowellLeave a comment

blog328

A well-deserved, crunchy and delicious pizza.

Learning the proper way to edit is almost as challenging as writing a first draft, especially when you don’t have much experience editing others’ work before trying to proof your own. Any analogy can help a new editor make sense of the steps and layers that go into proofreading and/or editing their own work. Especially analogies involving food.

Unsure of the steps you should take when looking over something you’ve written? Think dinner. Think pizza. 

Start with the Crust

A pizza’s crust, rounded-out dough as flat and thin as you can make it, is the foundation of every “successful” pizza. In the same way, the foundation of every successful piece of writing, its content, is where the editing process begins.

At this point, grammar, spelling, punctuation—do your best to look over it during your first read-through. Focus instead on the words, and whether they convey the message you are trying to get across. Are they accurate? Credible? If an outsider comes in and strips away the other layers (we’ll discuss those in a second), will they find a strong foundation, or just some fluffy dough with no substance?

Once your foundation is set, you’re ready for the next step.

Layer On Sauce

After the crust is set and ready to go, the sauce comes next. Think of sauce as a necessary filling, painting the crust and serving as a healthy barrier between that and its toppings.

This “filling,” in the editing sense, takes one step above the piece’s base content and looks at the way it is presented. This can include things as small as sentence structure and as large as paragraph breaks, order and placement. You’ll also pay closer attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation here. One of the most important ingredients in this step, however, is the use of transitions. Not necessarily outright “firsts,” “nexts” and “lasts,” but smooth segues from one related topic to another.

Having an evenly spread, and okay, flavorful sauce to layer over your crust ensures the content of your piece is well-structured, neat and readable in an orderly, organized sense.

Choose the Right Toppings

Toppings are meant to enhance a pizza, but they’re certainly not required. Some go for simple, plain cheese, and there’s nothing wrong with this style. Some like to get a little fancy, and if you’re able to find the right combination of toppings that fits your desires, and the desires of those who are going to eat it, you’re on your way to winning a Nobel Prize in Pizza Making. Sort of.

What are your piece’s “toppings”? This is where you get to examine your diction, your adjectives (a minimal amount of them, of course) and ultimately decide what should be included in the final product and shouldn’t.

This is probably the toughest step; you’re critiquing your own skill and creativity, which is a pendulum that can swing in two drastically different directions (“I’m the best writer ever, I don’t need to revise anything!” or “I’m the worst, no one will ever want to read this, I’m just going to delete the whole thing and start over”).

It takes time to find the right balance between all the elements we’ve discussed so far. Once you do (and this could take time—and that’s okay), you’re ready for the final step in your pizza making/editing adventure.

Cover with Cheese—and Bake

Cheese is more often than not the final layer of a pizza recipe before sliding the brilliant creation into the oven to bake. You can add as much or as little as you want, but this last step is what makes a pizza a pizza, and not just baked dough with tomato sauce on top.

In this step, you’ll review everything you’ve done up to this point. Is the crust solid, a good enough foundation to support the rest of what goes on top? Is the sauce spread evenly and thick enough that every bite will leave the diner satisfied? Are there enough toppings to keep the experience interesting, without overwhelming the overall taste of each slice? Does it look presentable, even before entering a 400 degree oven?

Once you add the cheese, your pizza—whatever you’ve written, revised and refined—is as good as it’s going to get. Let it rest in the oven of your mind for a bit. Bring it out again, let cool, and admire your (almost) perfect creation. 

Editing is hard, especially when we’re naturally so critical of our own work. Break the process up into steps and let those steps build comfortably on one another. Start with what’s most important and save the tweaking and “spicing up” for last. Then let yourself enjoy what you’ve accomplished, before sharing it with others.

Now if you’ll excuse us. Pizza for breakfast (while simultaneously editing articles) sounds pretty good right now.

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.