You Need an Editor: Hidden plot holes

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you decided to join us again, as we continue our series on why we all need editors. It’s something I feel quite strongly about, if you didn’t already know, and this month I want to do my best to show you why you need an editor, especially if you’re just starting out—and show you a little bit of what editors do, in case you never fully understood.

I honestly feel like editing is one of those things many writers just don’t understand, especially if they’ve never been professionally edited before. So let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?

You Need an Editor: Hidden plot holes

This is one of the biggest reasons why everyone needs an editor, which is why I thought it’d be a good place to start. Is it where your editor will start? No, probably not. But that’s neither here nor there.

You, my dear writer, have a plot hole in your manuscript. How do I know this? Because statistically, it’s true. I’ve never read a manuscript that didn’t have a plot hole in it, and I’ve read a lot of manuscripts. I’ve even read a few published novels that have plot holes in them… and that always makes me feel bad, if I’m being honest. I found that hole, and I could’ve fixed it!

Thing is, that only goes to show that everyone has plot holes. The problem with plot holes is that they’re really hard to find, if you’re the one who wrote them. They’re sneaky and they like to hide in plain sight, to the point that most writers have no idea the holes are there at all.

It’s one of the many things editors excel at, one of the things we actually pride ourselves on finding. When we find one, we give ourselves a pat on the back. When we mend it without a second thought, without even pausing to consider how to mend it, we think we ought to celebrate. Why? Because we just did the thing we love: we just took an author’s manuscript and made it better, in a way that’s very simple, to our eyes.

See, as editors (and this is probably something you’ll hear a lot this month), we love manuscripts. We love working with words and stories, shaping them into exactly what the author meant them to be, because we know no one has the capacity to do the whole thing on their own. We love helping authors show the world these beautiful stories—and no, most of the time we don’t take any credit for it. We don’t want any. We just want the author’s appreciation, that we found and fixed their plot holes.

Isn’t that what you’d want too, if you were us?

You know by now that your writing isn’t perfect. You know that. We know that. We also know very well that it will never be perfect, but that doesn’t mean we won’t do everything in our power to remove every single plot hole in sight and make your manuscript as close to perfect as we possibly can. You deserve that, after all.

Your story deserves that.

Your story deserves an editor.

How else will those plot holes ever get fixed?

[love]

{Rani Divine}