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As a freelance editor, I’ve worked with hundreds of writers to hone their prose and level up their creative writing skills. As of this year, I’ve completed over three hundred editing jobs, working on fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I believe working with an editor can hugely improve your writing skills, making you a more competitive writer in what is a very competitive environment of contemporary publishing. 

So it may sound a bit strange to hear what I’m about to tell you. You do not have to have an editor to get published. In fact, you can publish without a single soul having read your work. The secret is in what I call self-editing: The act of revising creative writing completely on your own. 

I recently sold a short story to the Flame Tree Publishing anthology Morgana Le Fay: New and Ancient Arthurian Tales. The story is called “Every Son a Reaver,” and I wrote it in response to the anthology submission call. That story was written and revised entirely on my own. It was not sent to my critique group, mostly because the submission window was short, and I did not have time. The only person who read it before I sent it in was my spouse, who has no writing experience. Yet, it got picked up by the editor and placed at the end of the anthology as the final story. And not a single word was changed by the editor in the final edits.

This sounds like a humble brag, but I wanted to tell you how I wrote this story to show you that it IS possible to self-edit and publish. The reality is that many writers: 1. Don’t have access to a critique group 2. Live somewhere remote where they can’t access writing workshops or classes 3. Can’t afford fancy classes or an editor, and 3. Struggle to benefit from the traditional model of critique and feedback taught by the literary establishment.

One of my goals as an editor and person who teaches writing is to break down barriers. While workshops, critique groups, editors, agents, and other resources people insist are necessary to writing and publishing are useful, and I absolutely believe in their power, they do not represent the only path to success in writing. There’s a lot of value to having work critiqued and edited, and I do think if a writer’s goal is publication, they should absolutely learn the skill of receiving feedback, but when it’s not possible, that doesn’t mean the writing can’t still progress.

The writing community has built up a certain path to publishing, and while it can be super helpful, there’s something radical about self-editing. After all, most famous writers in history worked alone. From Emily Dickinson to Marcel Proust to scores of anonymous writers, many writers created works in isolation that became famous when published.

In the end, it comes down to the writer and the page. In practice, one of the most important skills a writer can have is the ability to self-edit. A piece of writing goes through several stages, from the first draft to many iteration drafts to a complete product. Sometimes, it can feel like it’s never finished. For most of the life of a piece of writing, no one else but the writer will touch it. And I think that’s kind of beautiful.  

This is the topic of my upcoming workshop, Self-Editing for Writers

Self-Editing for Writers
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting March 3rd, 2025
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops
The best editor for a story is the author who wrote it. Every writer is different, and how you approach revising your work can vary based on the project. The key to self-editing is to see the bigger picture. Explore techniques for self-revising with step-by-step guidance from a freelance editor. Learn about the different types of editing, from developmental/content edits to copy/line editing and proofreading. You'll develop a personalized editing checklist that you can take with you from project to project, tweaking as you go.

What Is Self-Editing?

Self-editing is the process of reviewing and improving your own writing. Self-editing also refers to the system of revision the author uses. When I use the term “self-editing” I refer to a three-step process. As a freelance editor, I offer the following three types of editing (excerpted from my website):

Developmental Editing: During a developmental edit, I will dive deep into your manuscript. I'll read it from cover to cover with a keen eye for detail and make notes throughout the document to suggest areas that could use some tweaking. Along with a feedback letter, I'll focus on improving the story, plot, characters, and other essential elements that make your manuscript shine. I'm confident that this edit will help take your writing to the next level!Copyediting: During a copyedit, I will thoroughly review your manuscript by focusing on the language. Afterward, I will send you a document that has been line edited, containing corrections for voice, tone, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and other crucial elements that make a manuscript stand out. Please note that this option is recommended for writers who have already undergone a developmental edit or believe that their manuscript is already strong. Additionally, if you desire, I can create a style sheet for you as well.

Proofreading: I specialize in detecting and correcting all sorts of errors, including those related to spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting. I can also thoroughly review print-ready PDFs to ensure that they meet the highest standards of quality. With my keen attention to detail and nitpicky ways, you can rest assured that your writing will be polished to perfection!

I propose that writers can use this same three-step process to self-edit. Self-editing is a combination of big-picture revision, line-level revision, and lastly, proofing your own work. Really, you could invent any process that works for you, with any number of steps.

I find it helpful to come up with a self-editing process that you can use across any work—from short stories to essays to poetry to books. While each project may differ in its needs, having a framework for how to revise your writing saves a lot of time.

Why Self-Editing?

Using the three-step process of self-editing is helpful because it creates a framework or outline for revision.

As a writer, you may be familiar with how easy it is to get “in the weeds” as we say. This tendency for writers to get “stuck” on any stage of the writing process can only really be combatted by taking a more objective approach.

Revision is the act of looking at your work objectively, from a different perspective. How you achieve that might differ. For example, I often put my writing into a text-to-speech program and have it read to me in a different voice. I find this helpful because I can better “hear” my errors. Reading your work aloud has a similar effect.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve taught a workshop or attended an open mic and the second the writer starts reading their work, it’s clear they haven’t read it out loud yet. “I should have read this out loud before I came here” they say, or else, “That’s a typo!” There’s something about hearing the story out loud that really brings home what needs changing.

Self-editing is the act of looking at your work like an editor. It gives you three steps to follow that an editor would use, and it asks you to go through at least three revisions.

The reality is that most writers go through this three-step process, just in a different order. You might be the kind of writer who approaches everything like a copyedit, meticulously working line by line. You might revise as you write, drafting a bit, then revising, and so forth. The process is the process. There is no wrong or right way, only what the work asks of the writer.

However, I find this process of working from the bigger picture down to the smaller picture is super useful because it breaks down the steps. It makes sense to start with big-picture revisions like changing characters, rewriting point of view, or rearranging the plot—because it would be really difficult to line edit while doing those things. You might work really hard on making a certain paragraph perfect, only to cut it later. Again, the process is the process.

Re-Visioning: The Developmental Edit

When I was writing my Morgana Le Fay story, my first draft was just a mass of research dropped into a Word Doc. I wrote the story over a period of four days. Here is the first “draft” of the story, which was essentially an outline:

1. Morgana appears on the battlefield as a crow and screams, then saves Arthur and whisks him away to Avallon

2. Morgana falls in love with Arthur while healing him

3. Arthur betrays Morgana and leaves to triumphant return in Jesus/Messiah fashion

One exercise I’ve been playing with lately is to think of my short stories in three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. This outline was my attempt to come up with those three parts. The numbering system stayed with the story, which is told in numbered fragments. The next thing I wrote was the first section of the story. This part of the story basically matched the outline. I wrote the story linearly. Where it ended up differing from the outline was in #2 and 3: It is Arthur who falls in love with Morgana and Morgana who betrays Arthur. That was my first revision: I wanted Morgana to have more agency.

In her MasterClass, Margaret Atwood says, "Revision means re-vision—you're seeing it anew, and quite frequently when you're doing that, you see possibilities that you didn't see before and that light up parts of the book in a way that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't done that."

The key to the developmental stage of the self-edit is re-visioning. It’s about seeing the work in a new way, one that helps you understand how you can take the first draft from sketch or outline to a full-blown story.

The developmental edit stage is also where you find your voice. I believe it is a specific and recognizable voice that keeps a reader coming back to a book. Think about authors you love—what makes them unique compared to other books? It might be a combination of the genre they write in, the structure of the plot, the types of characters they write, or their storytelling style. If you picked up a new book by an author you love, you could probably recognize what about that book makes you fall in love all over again.

When you write the first draft, it might not feel very special or unique. Revision is where you can hone the things about your work that are entirely your own. But in order to do that, you have to step back and see the bigger picture.

Polishing: The Copyedit

If the developmental edit is about the bigger picture, then the copyedit is about putting a microscope on your words. Now that all your metaphorical ducks are in a row, it’s time to polish them up and make them shine.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her book Steering the Craft, calls this “being gorgeous”. As a poet, Le Guin understood the value of making the words you write beautiful. Gorgeous writing uses all of the poetic devices to make the words sound better—“onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect”.

The copyedit stage is about polishing your words to a finely honed edge. It’s line-by-line removal of unnecessary repetitions, looking for your own personal writing bugaboos to cut, rearranging paragraphs to make more sense, and choosing more original or beautiful words.

When we write the first draft, we’re not often thinking about how the words sound. We’re aiming to get the words on the page. Copyediting is the stage of self-editing where you go back and reimagine the page, making every word shine.

Proofreading: Icing on the Cake

The absolute last step of self-editing is proofreading. Many writers think this is something they don’t have to do theirselves—that an editor will do it for them. But the better your writing is, the more it can stand out from the crowd. As someone who has worked my way through more than one slush pile, I can tell you that the stories that get published are often the ones with very minimal grammar or spelling mistakes.

Think about this from the publisher or agent’s perspective: They are less likely to take on an author who needs a lot of help because it will require a lot of work on their part. The more you can do to help your writing get to the top of the list, the better.

At the bare minimum, proofreading means putting your writing through a spell-checker. But it helps to familiarize yourself, at least a bit, with the proofreading bible: The Chicago Manual of Style. This book, available at most bookstores, is a guide to spelling and grammar conventions. It’s also the most commonly used style guide in publishing.

Think of proofreading as the icing on the cake. Every writer can benefit from learning the basic conventions of spelling and grammar, but it’s not the biggest factor. A few errors here or there won’t stop your writing from being published eventually.

How to Improve Your Self-Editing Skills

Here are some simple things you can do to improve your self-editing:

• Take a break: To re-vision your work, you have to see it from a new perspective. The easiest way to do this is to put aside the work for a while.

• Read out loud: Use a text-to-speech reader or read your work out loud. Listen to the words and try to hear any awkward moments.

• Start big, end small: Start with the biggest issues, then break the revision down into smaller bits.

• Focus on one thing at a time: Don’t try to do everything at once.

• Learn the conventions of writing: Practice self-editing and read books on writing to help level up.

• Keep a writing checklist: Make a list of the issues you find in your writing and keep the list on hand for future projects.

• Come up with your own system: Find what works for you and do it.

• Read widely: See how other writers do it!

In the end, no one is going to revise for you. You have to be the one to do the work. You can spend all day getting feedback, attending workshops, and talking to other writers, and these things will feed your writing life. But it comes down to you and the page. Your imagination distills through you, the person you are and the experiences you have had. You have to push through the barriers and write what you love. Because the world needs your voice.

How do you know what you love? You just do. Love is chemistry. It doesn't make much sense from the outside in. Maybe there's some shame associated with it in your mind, shame of loving your writing above family, or shame of not being able to give enough attention to your writing. I'm handing you a permission slip to let go of that. Instead, look at your writing as a part of your life that enriches it, and vice versa.

A Self-Editing Exercise for Writers: Re-visioning

Take a piece of writing you’ve written and find a way to read it with new eyes. The goal here is to imagine how the work might read to someone else. You might put yourself in the shoes of an editor, finding your work in a slush pile or a reader picking up a book for the first time. There are a few techniques you might try to achieve this distance:

• Read your work out loud and record yourself. Listen back to the recording. How do the words sound? What places did you trip over while reading?

• Rewrite a passage of your work with the goal of “being gorgeous”. How can you make each word shine?

• Use a voice-reader app like Voice Dream or another text-to-speech program. This is useful because the "robotic" voices often don't sound human, so they don't mimic human speech patterns and you may hear the work differently.

• Ask a friend or family member to read the work to you.

• Re-type the work out or rewrite it by hand. Allow yourself to revise as you go.

• "Doodle" your work into images. What comes to mind?

• Henry David Thoreau said, "the art of life, of a poet's life, is not having anything to do." Give yourself an hour in the morning to do nothing but sit and think. Go for a walk with a notebook, sit and look out your window, experience the life around you. Don't do the dishes or get online. Just do nothing. If nothing comes to you, the worst you've done is spent an hour with your thoughts.

• After doing one of these exercises, revise your work with an entirely new vision for the piece.

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