How to Edit Your Own Work

“Let’s say it is a mess. The good news is, you have a chance to fix it.”

...

Editing two pieces of my own writing.

Hi everyone! It’s been amazing to see this Substack reach thousands of subscribers: thank you all for signing up and being early readers. Today, I’m back with another Craft Talk: this one, about editing ourselves. In my previous post, I wrote about reading other writers as a key part of my own practice. I want to share a great Susan Sontag quote with you about this very subject, from a piece of hers in The New York Times:

...to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you've written and see if it's O.K. and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it -- once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. ''To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,'' Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading.

Lots to think about there. One of you asked how reading others as research actually works—and if I was worried about another writer’s voice infecting my own. A good question, although another day, I’ll post my hot take about voice—I think we worry about “voice” way too much! For now I’ll say: when I am looking at three sentences in Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, I don’t mean I’m looking to copy their syntax. I mean I’m looking at them to see—for instance—that Hobhouse was able to encapsulate an entire mother-daughter dynamic in just one paragraph.

Then I ask myself: How? Usually the answer has to do with compression and specificity. It’s a good reminder that I don’t need two rambling pages to introduce a character; that I should be able to do it in a page.

Sontag also said something else really important in those remarks, about continuing to edit her own drafts:

…And though the rewriting -- and the rereading -- sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of ''literature'' in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit.

Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it.

“The good news is, you have a chance to fix it.”

I love Sontag’s advice, because I share her belief that editing and revising a manuscript is a huge part of writing it.

This week, I’m editing my book manuscript—currently about 26,000 words—before writing a big new section. I’m hoping to cut at least 5,000 words, and aspire to radically compressing two long sections into mere paragraphs. I find that this process of self-editing is one that my students tend to underestimate the true scope of. I noticed as a baby editor at The New Yorker that when I gave editorial notes to emerging or less experienced writers, they tended to do the exact scope or bare minimum of what I was suggesting, when really we were hoping that our notes would serve as a prompt to make good changes that we couldn’t even imagine.

A late-in-the-game self-edit of a piece I was writing for The Atlantic.

For me, perhaps 65% of the writing is in the editing. Sometimes only a little changes; sometimes a LOT changes. But the changes I make in editing are usually the things that give the manuscript its “voice,” its urgency, its sense of propulsion and authority (if I succeed). An early version of The Invisible Kingdom was about 20,000 words longer than the final one—and the experience of reading it was more of a slog. I decided I wanted it to read like a detective novel, and I cut and shaped chapter openings and endings to make each chapter address a puzzle that had to be solved or at least clearly expressed, building suspense and propulsion.

Here I want to offer a few key tools I use for self-editing.

Ten Steps in Self-Editing

There’s no formula to good writing, and it would be false to say so. That said, here are some things I find helpful in editing my own work and that of other writers.

1. Check for ECONOMY: Lack of economy is often the biggest difference between a successful and still unsuccessful piece of writing. In workshops, I often notice that students will say a scene simply isn’t working yet when in fact it would work if it were much, much shorter.

   I tend to believe that compression is the key to making most writing better—something I’ve seen borne out over and over in my work as an editor. (FWIW: even “maximalist” writing can be compressed. When I talk about compression, I usually am referring to the impact of each sentence or line, not to style or syntax itself. Getting more compressed can also—paradoxically—allow you to get more stylistically spacious or overstuffed.)
   
   PROMPT: Cut a section of a piece that isn’t working in half. Take a section that feels inert and see if you can turn into a single paragraph. One section of my book is set over six months in Ireland; I wrote an initial draft of about ten pages. It felt lax, so now I’m trying to capture that time in one page or less.
   

2. Reconsider your OPENING. Openings are important—more than we usually know. An opening should set the stage for what follows. Often an opening is too effortful/controlled by the writer, and sounds different from what follows. Or, the opening doesn’t set up the actual piece; it sets up the piece the writer initially thought they were writing.
   
   PROMPT: Try writing a new opening after you have a full draft. Give yourself permission to really reimagine it, and see what happens. (This can feel scary, but it’s worth a try if you have a piece that’s just not coming into focus.)

   
   

3. Evaluate your SYNTAX. Edit the piece with an eye to your syntax. We all have habits and defaults. Are you varying your syntax , combining longer sentences with shorter ones? If not, is that an intentional stylistic effect (as seen in, say, Javier Marias’ work), and is that intention serving the piece? (We all have many intentions; the question is, Are they serving the writing? If not, you may need to relinquish them.)

4. Establish your PSYCHIC LEXICON. What words/images are you repeating, what is your psychic lexicon? Can you get more aware of it, more intentional in your revision about its effects? This is especially important for poets. It helps to become aware of what you’ve been doing unconsciously. You want the world of a poem to feel cohesive, the metaphors to come from a coherent psychic landscape. (If that landscape is meant to be INCOHERENT, the trick is to be coherently incoherent.)

5. Ask what your ENDING is doing for you. I ask two questions of every piece I’m writing and editing. 1) How does the end connect to the beginning? 2) Does this ending open outward in a satisfying way, while still providing closure? In my own work, I often want the reader to feel they have arrived somewhere, but it’s crucial that the ending doesn’t offer false resolution. It needs to contain some of the puzzlement I started with, or I don’t trust it. Sometimes, the way to do that is through syntax. E.g., using a participle form of a verb, like “I am waiting…” instead of “I wait,” can make action feel ongoing. Or, as Stanley Kunitz, the lyric poet, often told his classes, when you don’t know how to end a poem, find an image that resonates but doesn’t explain.

   
   PROMPT: If you have an essay or poem that is not working, rework the ending with an image that feels organic but also unexplained. OR: Rework your syntax so the sentence itself enacts a kind of ongoingness.

6. Don’t forgot to check for HIDDEN THINGS. What haven’t you said that you need to say? Is there something you are scared to say or just “haven’t gotten to”?
   
   PROMPT: Get a pack of index cards and write a few direct/scary/frontal statements on them. Consider adding these into your manuscript, looking for a good spot to filter them in. Or, see if the spirit of what you wrote is in the piece or can be massaged into the dialogue in a given scene.
   

7. Re-evaluate your RESEARCH. Usually if a piece of reported or argumentative nonfiction is not working, the reporting/research may not be quite solid. I often do another round of research just as I think I’m finishing a piece or a story, pusshing against my own assumptions.

   

   Editing myself and writing notes to myself in the margins, which I often do when I’m thinking through a revision.

   With poems, I reread to see if my observations are more generic than they need to be. For instance, Charles Simic once pointed out, of a poem I showed him, that I might want to replace the generic word “hat” with the more specific “boater” or “beanie.” He was right.
   

8. IGNORE your manuscript and embrace “slow thinking.” Sometimes, to finish a particular chapter or poem or essay you have to just put the manuscript away and not read it for a few months, until you can read it as an editor, rather than the writer struggling to articulate something. (Our emphasis on productivity leads many people not to acknowledge this or talk about it openly. But sometimes time and what I call “slow thinking” is the missing piece.)
   

9. Engage in one last act of RADICAL TIGHTENING. Sometimes I copy only the sections I know I love of a piece or book into a new document. Working only with the much smaller section of pages I really love can make the book come into focus for me. Prompt: Try doing this and see what happens. Open a new document and cut and paste in only the parts you are excited about.
   

10. Finally: Is your STRUCTURE not working? If you can’t find a good structure, you may not have written enough. It’s time to keep writing, and keep cutting!

I hope this is helpful! Enjoy playing with them. And please share your own self-editing tricks and tips in the comments, or let me know which of these resonate for you.

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