You Need an Editor: Grammarian fails

Hi everybody, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking about editing. Yeah, I know it’s something that we talk about a lot, but that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, I think the amount of time I spend talking about editing should show you just how important it really is. Editing is one of those things every single writer needs to know about, inside and out, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re talking editing, for all those who haven’t been edited yet. And for those of you who have, I think you might just learn something about the editing process, in general.

You Need an Editor: Grammarian fails

We writers like to think of ourselves as the best grammarians in the world. I know we do, because I’m one of us. *wink wink* We like to think that we’ve gone over our manuscript enough times that we don’t have any errors, that there couldn’t possibly be any errors, because we’re such grammarians that we know what we’re doing every step of the way, every moment of the day, every word we type. And we would be wrong. If you haven’t come to that revelation yet, I’m sorry to burst your bubble.

I know you’ve spent a lot of time in editing your manuscript. I know you did. Especially if you’ve been reading my blog over time, and you’ve followed my advice. You know that you need to have edited your manuscript several times, before you decide how you want to publish your book. You know that. And I know you’ve put in all the time and effort to make it as good as you can. But I also know you’ve missed something.

There’s a really good suggestion out there on the interwebs, for writers who are editing their manuscripts. It’s to get a program that’ll read your manuscript aloud to you, so you can see how it flows, how it reads, and potentially catch some of those grammar issues. But even this method won’t guarantee that you’ve caught every grammar issue, by the time you go to print.

How do I know all this? How do I know that you’ve missed something along the way, and need someone else to edit your book?

Because I’m a writer and an editor, and I know this world from both sides. But that’s the cheating answer, isn’t it? I know because I’ve found a million grammar errors in self-published books (and several in books from Penguin Random House, too), books that make me cringe to the point that I’ve great difficulty reading self-published indie authors, because I’m afraid I’ll sit down to read and find my brain working to edit the book rather than enjoy the story—and that, my dear authors, is the very last thing you want your readers to deal with.

You need an editor, because you want your readers to enjoy your story, and not be distracted by the grammar issues you’ve missed. You need an editor, because one mind on their own can’t possibly catch every spelling error, missed comma, incorrect punctuation, and incorrect word use in a single manuscript. It’s just not possible, especially for the mind who wrote it, the mind who knows how it’s supposed to read (and so, automatically reads it as it should be read). You need an editor, because you’re not perfect.

At the very least, I implore you to hire a proofreader. If you can’t afford full-on editing yet, that’s fine. I know how budgets go. But at least save up to have a proofreader or copyeditor go through your manuscript to make sure you’ve removed as many grammar issues as possible. Please. Do it for me. Do it for you. Do it for everyone who will ever read your book.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

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}

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}