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3 Ways to Expedite Your Editing Process

October 24, 2018 | 3 min read

Some writers love editing. Others… not so much. Either way, editing is an essential part of the writing process. And, like writing, it’s time-intensive.

Fortunately, editing doesn’t have to take forever. If you want to refine your writing without spending endless hours on it, consider these three tips.

1. Start with an Outline

It’s hard to get anywhere without a map (or maybe a navigation app is more appropriate for 2018). Likewise, it’s hard to write without a destination in mind. To predetermine that destination, consider outlining.

Your outline can be as simple or complex as you’d like. If you’re writing a standalone blog post, your outline might be bullet points. If you’re writing a novel, your outline might be several pages. Either way, spending time creating an outline in advance can save you major time in the editing process. If you’re wondering why, let’s refer back to our map metaphor.

If we travel without a navigation app, we’re likely to get lost along the way. That means wasted time backtracking, rerouting, and making U-turns. The same goes for writing. An outline shows us where we’re going so we don’t get lost along the way. Without one, we might very well get to the editing process and realize that we went way off course. Then we’d need to spend extra editing time getting everything back on track. That’s no way to expedite our editing.

You can read more about the importance of outlining in this post, Outlining for Writers Who Hate to Outline.

2. Use Editing Software

The robots haven’t taken over yet—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t super smart. In fact, there are many programs out there that can help edit your writing.

Take ProWritingAid, for example. It works like your grammar checker but goes way beyond just grammar errors. It detects a huge range of writing issues that make your writing awkward or unclear, like passive voice, sticky sentences, repetitive phrasing, and inaccurate word choices. And it does all this at lightning speed.

Try uploading a piece of your writing to the online tool and run a summary report. It’s free to use and you’ll see the key changes that will most improve your writing. Or, to save even more time, you can use integrations for Microsoft Word/Office, Google Chrome, Google Docs, Scrivener, and more.

It’s an easy way to edit faster (and more efficiently).

3. Take a Break Between Writing and Editing

I know. This sounds contradictory. Why would I recommend taking additional time for an article about saving time?

Because it really works. You need not take a long break between writing and editing. It could be a day. It could be an hour. Whatever you choose, taking time between writing and editing will accelerate the entire process.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the downtime allows your brain to switch gears. Though they are similar, writing and editing require different skills. Writing is about seeing what isn’t there; editing is about refining established ideas. It’s difficult to transition from one to the other. Taking a break after writing resets our brains for editing. And when we do that, editing goes faster.

Furthermore, breaking before editing gives your unconscious mind time to reflect on what you’ve written. Here’s a non-writing example: Think back to the last time you lost your car keys. (I did it 20 minutes ago.) You probably found that you looked everywhere and couldn’t find them. Then maybe you stepped away for a while. When you returned, you might’ve suddenly remembered where you left your keys.

No, the keys didn’t telepathically notify you of their location (though that would be pretty cool). That was the work of your unconscious mind. It works the same way for writing and editing. Your unconscious mind finds solutions to problems, even when you don’t know it.

Alright, I’ve taken enough of your time. Go edit!

About the author:

Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. He loves the present tense and multiple POV characters. When he grows up, he wants to be a professional Magic: The Gathering player. For more of his work, visit www.kyleamassa.com.

"In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation."

So we decided to go on a mission to learn from some of Ireland's greatest writers.

Here are just a few of the quotes that struck us:

"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."

Oscar Wilde cuts right to the heart of creativity here. What is creativity but the mind striking out of the grooves of regularity?

"I love communicative problems. They always introduce just enough friction for me to feel drawn into a scene, when there’s some slippage between what somebody is trying to say, or feels capable of saying, and what the other person wants to hear or is capable of hearing."

If you've read any of Sally Rooney's award-winning books, you'll recognize this device in her plots. Try the same in your work when things are feeling a little dry or slow.

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

Nobody presents writing truths as concise and witty as Oscar Wilde. Who among us hasn't agonized over a comma for hours?

Sounds like Oscar needed a Freewrite.

"I don’t ever plot. And I do very little research, as little as possible. I prefer to use my imagination. Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self."

Claire Keegan's a freewriter! In this interview, Claire explains that the main character in her award-winning book, Small Things Like These, completely changed over the course of rewrites and revisions.

"The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize."

Colm Tóibín perfectly sums up the disembodied experience of writing here. The writer disappears and the characters take center stage.

"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously."

James Joyce was certainly an adventurer, and though his notion to a "modern writer" predates ours by about a century, we don't think all that much as changed. Writers still need to take risks!

"I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare.’ I say I ‘walked down the road.’ I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning.’ I say I ‘passed a school.’ You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

Maeve Binchy's own voice is apparent in every book she wrote. Her characters speak like real people, and that makes them all the more endearing.

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

What a poetic way to encapsulate the experience of writing poetry. Yeats certainly knew a thing or two about using that internal quarrel to create beautiful, timeless work.

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