You Need an Editor: Perfection isn’t perfect

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s September already, which means it’s suddenly time for us to start a new series… and I was just getting used to the last one. We’d been getting outside our comfort zones, you know, working on stretching ourselves and growing beyond what we already knew. And this month, as I’m so fond of logic, I wanted to take a little bit of a logical progression.

Now that August got us all outside our comfort zones and taught us to write things we wouldn’t normally write, let’s get those things edited, shall we?

You Need an Editor: Perfection isn’t perfect

I know how wrong that sounds. I even know some of you serious grammarians out there will be bothered by it, because by definition, perfection is, in fact, perfect. But hear me out. I have something very serious to say, and I know some of you won’t want to hear it.

I know writers. I know writers, because I am a writer. And I started Too Many Books to Count because I wanted to connect with writers, to teach writers some of the things I know and help them not make the mistakes I made along the way. Which is why I really wanted to talk about editing this month, to begin with. Because when I started out, I didn’t realize how much I really needed an editor. I didn’t even know what I was missing, if I’m being honest.

Truth be told, I have no idea what you write. I don’t know if you write fantasy or romance or children’s books or even thrillers—and it doesn’t matter, because the fact remains, all the same.

You need an editor.

For some of you, this is already abundantly clear. You know you have errors in your manuscript and you know you can’t possibly hope to find them all yourself. And to you, I send a high five. You’re awesome. You’re the smart ones. You know what you’re doing, at least a little bit.

But for the rest of you, those of you who are like I was when I started out, I need you to hear me. I know that you think your work is amazing. I know that you think it’s the bees knees, the best thing since sliced bread, a story every human on the planet needs to read if they’re going to survive the next twenty years—but if you haven’t been edited yet, you’re wrong.

And I don’t mean just you running through your manuscript and fixing any errors you see. I mean hiring someone to edit for you, hiring someone to look through your manuscript and point out the errors they see, because their eyes are different from your eyes and they’re almost guaranteed to find something you didn’t see.

You need an editor, because that work that you think is perfect… isn’t.

That perfect manuscript you’ve been working on for so many years? It’s much farther from perfection than you’re willing to admit. I’m almost sorry to tell you that, if I’m being honest. I don’t want to be the one to burst your bubble. But at the same time… at the same time, I want to save you from something that I went through, from publishing an unedited manuscript that I now look back on and cringe.

And for the rest of the month, I’ll be explaining, in detail, why you need an editor—and what an editor really does, if you’ve ever wanted to know.

How do I know all this? Because I’m an editor too, you know. ;-)

[love]

{Rani Divine}