How To Edit Your Work

_____After you finish a story, don’t start editing it right away. Take some time to celebrate actually writing the first draft. Moving a story from the idea to the written/typed page is a small but significant miracle. You also need to put the piece aside for a few days (not longer than a week). When you edit, you will need to be objective and distancing yourself from it will help. When you edit, you will need to be objective.
_____Now, when you sit down to edit your work, you have to do it not as the writer but as a reader. Pretend it’s your first time reading it. Forget that you already know how it ends or what the character's motives are. You should also have on hand a dictionary. It wouldn't hurt to have a thesaurus and this book. (All three of these can be found online, check the editing links.)
_____I suggest you focus on the content of the story first and then the punctuation and grammar. It may seem easier to check the punctuation, grammar, and spelling first, but you don’t want to spend time correcting punctuation for a section you ultimately decide to take out. The specifics of editing are discussed in later topics.
_____If you have a hard time distancing yourself or you really want another person’s point of view, get someone else to help critique. Don’t think this let’s you off the hook. The responsibility for editing still rests solely with you. A friend or “guest” editor can only give you suggestions; any rewriting or reshaping to craft a better story is something you will have to do.
_____It may help you to know that every professional writer edits her work. Rarely is anyone so great a writer that she can write something down, right from the top of her head, and it be perfect. So don’t think of editing as a chore or something that “real” writers don’t have to do.

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