You Need an Editor: How long/short is too long/short?

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s the last week of our series, and I have two more reasons for you, why you need an editor. You know me, I’m full of reasons why you should hire an editor, why you shouldn’t leave the editing only to your own eyes. For the sake of your readers, if nothing else, editors are extremely necessary if you intend to publish your work. If you’re only going to let your mom read it… well then, you’re probably fine without editing. ;-)

All month long, I’ve done my best to tell you of the myriad reasons why editors are important, for writers. And today, I have what is probably one of the biggest reasons why you need an editor.

You Need an Editor: How long/short is too long/short?

My dear writer, if I know you like I think I do, then you really don’t have a clue how long your manuscript should be. Sure, you’ve probably done a little bit of research into how long an average novel in your genre is, and you might even know how long you want the story to be, but I can nearly guarantee that you haven’t considered how long your story wants to be, on it’s own.

That’s a thing that editors know, and can tell simply by reading through your manuscript. It’s one of the things I pride myself on doing. I know, on a single read-through, which sections need to be lengthened and which sections need to be cut down. I know what parts will read extremely well from the point of view of the reader, and which ones will be boring, confusing, or just need to be blocked out better. I know this, because I know novels. Because I’ve worked with novels for a very long time. And, honestly, because I’m also a reader.

It’s not to say that you, as a writer, aren’t a reader and therefore can’t possibly know where you’ve written too much and where you’ve written too little, but that because you’re so close to your manuscript, because you’re the one who wrote it and therefore you have an amazing vision into what’s going on, what’s happening, the background, the information never entirely privy to the reader… you literally cannot tell, where the manuscript needs scenes to be extended and better fleshed out, and what sections you need to skip through, because the information isn’t exactly necessary.

That’s where your editor comes in. That’s where we’re able to help you, to show you which scenes you might need to expand, which things we want to know more about, which things we want to see more of, and which things you can cut back on a bit.

In my own writing, this often means cutting out some dialogue, and replacing it with exposition. When I’m writing, I like to give a lot of information through dialogue—but that’s not always the best way to do things. And I didn’t know that, until I’d worked with an editor and she told me I was using my dialogue as a crutch.

We don’t want crutches, in our writing. We want to better our writing, all around. And sometimes, an editor is the only one who can really help us do that.

So yes, my writer friend. You need an editor. Because your eyes cannot see what’s unknown to them, until someone else point it out. I think that sentence might’ve gotten away from me, a bit.

[love]

{Rani Divine}