I used to be hesitant to turn my completed manuscripts over to an editor, proofreader or even a friend to review because I didn’t really want their ideas mixed up with mine. I was afraid they would suggest changes to suit their own tastes—try to get me to write their story, article or book.
In fact, I’ve known authors who have rewritten their books numerous times after listening to various critics, editors and casual readers.
Now, however—after years and years of time spent writing, revising, self-editing my own work and also editing for other authors, I realize how extremely valuable and critical those extra sets of eyes can be to our projects.
Just this week, I did some editing for a client. She has been working on her book for years—writing, rewriting and self-editing. She hired a professional team of editors recently and felt as if she was good to go. She came to me for help creating a marketing plan and suggested that I read her manuscript to give me a feel for her project. She said something to the effect of, “Please let me know if you see anything out of line.”
Welllll, in the course of reviewing her marvelous manuscript, which was basically well-written and carefully edited, I found a problem here and there—too much space between sentences, a comma instead of a period, a missing quotation mark and a few places where I became confused about who was speaking. THEN, I started getting rather confused about dates. This is, after all, a true story with an important chronology. It must be important because every incident, every entry, every chapter is dated. But the dates started making no sense to me. So I went through the book a second time and wrote down each date and each incident. Everything seemed okay, until…
There it was—the author had jumped a full decade off track—hit the wrong number key, I guess. Doesn’t matter, this was a critical mistake and it had to be corrected.
These are the types of things a second, third and eighth new set of eyes can spot before a book goes to print. While your friend may not notice the extra a in Barbara or that Simon is sometimes spelled Simone or that you’ve used the word “angle” instead of “angel,” if you have enough people taking a look, you’re bound to find most, if not all, of the most glaring mistakes.
Ask, beg and coerce friends and acquaintances to read through your manuscript. PAY editors (yes, sometimes it takes more than one) to edit it. I guarantee you, you will be surprised at some of the errors or oversights they’ll discover and that you WILL want to fix.
Not everyone will notice that you refer to Doreen as Mrs. Sharp sometimes and other times, Ms. Sharp. But someone in the group of proofers will. And what about when an author has a character greet a stranger with, “Hello Mrs. England,” when it’s obvious that character has no idea if the woman is married or not. In fact, in today’s world, “Ms.” is the common choice.
Creating or recreating a scene is touchy business. It takes a whole lot of concentration and the keen ability to visualize every single detail—to get inside the characters’ heads and truly understand where they’re coming from and how they would potentially act or react.
Even with the holidays nipping at our heels, many of us are still writing stories, blog posts, articles, chapters. Heck, I wrote a poem this morning to present at our holiday gathering of 20 family members. It’s 20 verses long. That’s what they get when they invite a writer to share a story. And I expect plenty of critique. After all, the poem features each of them.