How to Edit Your Writing Yourself

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

Anne Lamott is famously a proponent of “shitty first drafts,” and the real key to that whole thing is what comes next: editing. Professional writers endure the shitty first draft, then make the magic happen in revision.

So, you’ve got your shitty first draft. Where to go from there? Here are a few checkpoints I always start with when getting my books in order:

1. Make sure you’ve used active voice, not passive voice, as much as possible. (Active voice: I edited my book. Passive: The book was edited.) Usually, this results in clearer, more concise sentences, though there are exceptions. And yes, I check sentence-by-sentence. It’s grueling and makes me feel like some kind of hero.
2. Relatedly: Check your verbs, sentence-by-sentence, to make sure they’re as strong, vivid, and varied as possible. Within reason, of course. No one likes a human thesaurus.
3. Check punctuation and grammar. If you don’t know the basics, learn.
4. Examine your beginnings and endings. The book beginning and ending, of course, but also beginnings and endings of chapters. Make them shine.
5. Delete anything that doesn’t move your book forward.
6. Make sure there’s no jargon or phrases that your audience won’t understand.
7. Keep an eye out for your tics—words and phrases repeatedly used. This happens in almost every book. When you write a lot of words, you get into certain grooves, sometimes surprising ones. I’ve overused “flummoxed” and “vexed” in various drafts, good words when used once, glaring when repeated dozens of times.
8. Read your work aloud! Works wonders.
9. Get a copy of Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit and read it through, then use its tips and checklists with abandon. I have relied on my rumpled copy through seven books now.

This list is adapted from my e-booklet, Write That Nonfiction Book Already: A Practical Guide for Writing a Successful Book, from Conception to Publication.