Episode Four: Why Fiction Writers Can’t Just Edit Their Own Work

Listen to episode three here.

Watch episode three here.

If your image of a writer is someone sitting alone in an attic writing a masterpiece all by themselves, I’ve got news, that image is a myth. Collaboration is essential to writing a great book. Today, I’m talking about why you can’t just edit your book and five specific areas where we tend to mess up when we try to do all the editing by ourselves.

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Key Takeaways:

• The image of the solitary genius writer is a myth.

• Collaboration is essential for revising. That doesn’t mean you need to hire a professional editor, but it does mean you need to let other people read your work.

• Our brains process information based on patterns, which can lead to errors in writing.

• There are five common areas where writers can make faulty assumptions that affect the reading experience. They include:

  • Assuming character motivations are self-evident

  • Worldbuilding infodumps - we know why that information matters, but readers don’t yet

  • Assuming all readers would react the same way your character would to a given situation so you don’t need to put their reaction on the page

  • Vague visual descriptions

  • Typos/misspelled words

• To avoid missing typos/ misspelled words you can: use text-to-speech software to hear your work out loud, change the font/text color to trick your brain, use an AI powered spell check (e.g., Grammarly or ProWritingAid) or hire a professional copyeditor/proofreader.

Transcript

Please Note: This transcript was automatically generated and has not been edited.

Olivia Bedford (00:00)

Today I am going to talk about why you can't just revise your own work no matter how great you are, no matter how good of a writer you are, you cannot revise completely by yourself. And we're going to talk about why that is.

I want you to imagine this. A writer, a solitary genius, sits alone in a damp attic, at the computer, and magic pours from their fingers. They don't need anyone else. They don't need any writing guides. They don't need an editor or a critique partner or anything else. And in fact, if they had help,

That would just be an impediment to the real work. Those people would just be stifling their genius. My friends, if that is your image of a great writer, you need to know that that image is a lie. It is a myth. The solitary genius writer does not exist.

You need other people to write a great book and you definitely need them to help you revise. Welcome to another episode of the Better Writer

Today I am going to talk about why you can't just revise your own work no matter how great you are, no matter how good of a writer you are, you cannot revise completely by yourself. And we're going to talk about why that is. This is another opinion that is probably not as controversial as my thoughts on plotting versus pantsing, but it does counter some of the narrative that we hear especially about, you know,

how writing works. And I think especially if you are someone who is newer to the writing process, you may not know how collaborative writing is when you start working toward publication because we don't see that part of the process. We hear about the authors, we don't hear as much about the people behind the scenes who are helping to make those books come into the world.

And you don't really find that out until you start writing yourself. So I want to try to demystify that a little bit and talk about why you can't do it by yourself. You need other people. And if you don't believe me, let's start with an example that I find to be so much fun. And that is the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby, which he did not want to call the Great Gatsby.

settled on that title. He went through a couple of different titles actually. Some of the ones he considered were Under the Red, White and Blue, Gold-Headed Gatsby, The High Bouncing Lover, not really sure what that means, and Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires. But the one that he wanted to use in the end was Tremolchio in West Egg. I'm say that again. Tremolchio in West Egg. And if you're wondering

What in the heck is a tremolchio? What does that even mean? You are not alone because that was my exact reaction when I found out about this. I did a little bit of research and I found out that tremolchio is the name of a character from a Roman satire. And tremolchio was a former slave who

ended up becoming wealthy and became known for throwing these lavish parties. Now, who does that sound like? So this title wasn't completely random. There was a very good reason for Fitzgerald to think Trimalchio in West Egg was a great idea, a great title. The problem here is that Fitzgerald wasn't thinking enough about his audience.

and how they would respond to and react to this title. Again, the connection between Tremolchio and Gatsby is clear. Gatsby, of course, wasn't born a slave. Though I have heard some theories that Gatsby is actually a white passing black man, don't ask me what the evidence for that is. I could not tell you, but I have heard it said. Again, that is a whole other thing that we could talk about, but...

there is a connection between Tremolica and

connection is very clear.

But It's not super enticing. Tremolchio as a figure in satirical Roman literature is not a good hook into the Gatsby story that we know and love. And I think the real issue, the real issue is that

using the name Trimalchio, making that allusion, that reference in the title is going to exclude a large portion of the potential audience. For most Americans Trimalchio is not a recognizable character. I had to go and Google who that even was or what that was referring to. I'm guessing that 100 years ago when Gatsby was originally written, that reference may have been more familiar to a certain

class of people.

Fitzgerald's Yale friends may have known who Trimalchio was. However, I'm going to guess that even 100 years ago, that was not a common reference for most Americans. It was probably just a common reference for someone who took the same classes as Fitzgerald. You probably heard

about Trimalgio in a class at one point or write about him in something and it was like, ⁓ yes, that is the perfect thematic connection. But he was assuming that the parallels he drew in his own mind would automatically make sense to his readers. He was making an assumption about what his audience would associate with the name Trimalgio when they saw it in his title. And the real problem, I think, is that

the thematic connection between Trimalchio and Gatsby isn't clear until you've read the book. And unless you are going to analyze it in a very intellectual way, the appeal of Gatsby is not about just the concept of someone going from rags to riches. There's so much more to it that you understand after reading. But just seeing it upfront,

Tremolchio and West Egg doesn't really tell us anything about the story or about the characters, about what we're going to get from that book. So again, the title makes sense, but it is not anything close to this title that has now become iconic, that kind of draws people in. We're wondering, who's Gatsby? Why is he great? In a way that we just don't ask that question of who's Tremolchio and why is he in West Egg. It's just not as compelling of a question for us to be asking before we read.

So Fitzgerald in the end did not arrive at the title of the Great Gatsby by himself. It was the editor, Maxwell Perkins, who, as far as editors go,

famous, well known for being a great editor. He is the one who advocated for the Great Gatsby as a title and really pushed for it. And now here we are, however many years later, I don't think that high school students

all over this country would be reading The Great Gatsby a hundred years later if it was called Trimalchio and Wesseigh. It could be the same book. But I don't think it would have been iconic. It would not have become the widespread popular book that is today if it had that title. If Fitzgerald had kept his blinders on, had gone with his assumptions, his

idea of what was going to work, we would not have the Gatsby we know and love or maybe don't love. I don't know how much your high school English experience was, but it wouldn't exist. And Fitzgerald is still the author. Fitzgerald is the name that we know, the name that we associate with Gatsby. Most people will never hear of Maxwell Perkins. Most people will never know how he influenced the story. And you know, I

speak for myself, I assume most editors feel the same way. I am sure he's fine with that. He did not want to be known as the guy who named Gatsby or anything like that. But he still played an integral part in making that book what it was, even though he was never going to be recognized for it, at least not outside the publishing world. And that is the power of collaboration. Collaboration

does not mean you are losing your story or losing your voice. It is having someone come in and say, hey, I know that made sense in your head, but is it going to make sense to anyone else? You need that person because our brains are not designed to do that kind of thinking on their own.

Let's talk about the problem with our brains. I want to this by saying our brains are magical. Our brains do so many incredible things. And even when things sometimes go wrong, you know, I say this as a person who has struggled with depression for a long, time, there are so many things that our brains do that are just straight up magic. The fact that we are alive and talking and thinking and reading, it's incredible. But our brains are not perfect, as we all know. And one thing about

how we think and how we function is that our brain operates based on patterns. And that's because we have to.

Our brains are constantly inundated with information. Sensory details are coming at us from all directions all the time. For example, if you are driving in your car right now listening to this podcast, you are hearing me talk, but you're also hearing the sounds that your car makes,

Your brain is also processing the temperature of the car. Are you too hot, too cold? Your brain is processing the feeling of the seat against your backside, the feel of the steering wheel under your hands, the flow of air coming out of the heater and touching you. Your brain is processing the amount of the light that is coming through the windshield. It's seeing all the other cars on the road. It's seeing the buildings on the road next to you. It's seeing the markings on the street. It's seeing lights and...

children running and countless other things. And you are not consciously processing all of them because if you were, you would never be able to function. So your brain is constantly filtering things out and your brain is constantly taking shortcuts. Your brain looks for patterns and it makes automatic associations. We do that so we can move faster, so we can function.

The problem is that your brain doesn't always know when those automatic associations are correct. This happens all the time with typos because if you are a proficient reader,

When you look at your own

you are not consciously processing every word on the page. Your brain is basically taking the first letter and the context and then automatically filling in the gaps. So you literally cannot see typos because your brain isn't reading what's actually there. Your brain is just making an assumption of what's there and then moving forward with that. So.

If you have ever had the experience of you wrote something, you read through it a million times, and then two weeks later you came back to it and found a typo, that's why you couldn't see the typo because your brain was just saying, oh, that's what she meant to say, we'll just keep going, keep moving, and so on.

The type of example is very obvious, but the same thing can happen on a developmental level because you know everything about your story. You know your characters, their backstories, their motivations, where those motivations are coming from. You know what their flaw is, what they need, what they need to get over. You know everything. You know everything about your world. You know everything about your plot. You know everything about what you intended to put in your story. But you can't actually see objectively whether

everything you intended to convey showed up on the page or if some of that story is still living in your head and only in your head. All right, you now know that this is a problem, but what the heck are you actually supposed to do about it? The first thing, and I'm just going to get this out of way right now, you must have other people read your work. The only way to know if the story is there on the page for them to read is to actually test that out by having other people

read your work. I know I'm saying this as a professional editor. I obviously have a bias, but help does not need to be professional.

You should have more than one person read your book, and I am not advocating for hiring a bunch of different developmental editors. Get help from beta readers, from writing friends, critique groups. There are multiple ways to get feedback. You should get feedback in multiple stages in the process so you can make sure your intention, your vision is actually on the page in a way that makes sense to your readers.

But at the same time, feedback is not the only way. Once you know that your brain is likely to skip over things and fill in assumptions that you didn't intend, you can start being more conscious about your editing. So I just wanted to go over a few areas where these assumptions are most likely to show up so that you can be aware of those when you go to revise your own work. And you can try to find those areas and make sure you're being crystal clear before you get feedback.

So you're not, you know, having to go back and revise a ton after your beta readers have already read your book. All right, the first area where I see this issue come up a lot is with character motivations. And that's because you know your characters so well. You understand where their behavior is coming from. You know why they're doing what they're doing and you know what they're trying to accomplish. And oftentimes, instead of making that clear for readers, writers will imply motivations without actually stating them.

That can happen because you don't have enough interiority on the page, we're not getting into your character's head, we don't actually know what they're thinking, but it can also come from you having a certain life experience and assuming that other readers are going to interpret your character's actions and motivations the same way. For example, if your character is really, really determined to get...

married by a certain age. you might assume that everyone grows

a society or in a family or in a culture where that is the norm, but you might have readers who are coming from a different context where they were actually encouraged to get married later. so your assumption may not be true for your readers and therefore your character wanting to get married by 21 might be completely bonkers to them because that's not their experience.

So you need to make sure that we know why your character in particular wants to get married by 21. What are they going for? are they trying to accomplish? Because the assumption that you assume makes sense to your readers may actually not be clear to everyone.

Trouble spot number two that I see is with world building info dumps. And this one might sound a little counterintuitive because in this case, you're giving readers more information. You're not making an assumption. You are explaining to the world to them because they don't know anything about your world. The problem comes in when you are giving readers information without context because you know it's going to become important later. But

readers don't know that. They don't have the benefit of knowing that this tiny little tidbit is going to pay off in a big way later. For example, you might find it really, important to fully describe the layout of the castle in your book because you know that in the final battle on page 500, there's a little side door that is going to completely turn the tide of the battle and you don't want it to feel like a cheap trick.

So you know you need to establish that this door exists early on. So you decide to fully describe the castle on page 10, including a lot of description about that door that's going to be important on page 500. The problem is that as a reader, I do not know what is going to happen on page 500. You know I don't. All I see on page 10 is 17 pages about a door.

that I don't care about because the story hasn't yet started. The door needs to matter on page 10, if you're describing it on page 10. It can also still matter on page 500. Keep that twist. Don't get rid of it. But you need to find a way to make that information about the door relevant on page 10. And you also need to filter out what is actually important for people to know.

Do I need to know that the door is carved with an image of the first king? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe I just need to know that there is a door and I can see that there's a door when your main character uses it to sneak out one night when they want to go drinking with their friends. That's not the only option. There are many, many ways you could make the door relevant. But if you just describe the door, if you just give me that detail completely devoid of story context, A, I'm probably not going to remember it.

But more likely, I'm going to get bored and shut the book and not come back to the story. And I will never make it to that epic battle on page 500 because I wasn't hooked by the story in the beginning. So again, we want to world build. We need to world build. But the world building has to happen in the context of the story. It is not enough for you, the author, to know that something will be important later. You need to make it important in the moment for your readers.

Alright, trouble spot number three, and this is one that gets a lot of writers. It is very common, so do not despair if you fall into this. Number three is vague visual descriptions. I'm gonna give you an example. I want you to imagine a dog. Imagine a dog. Close your eyes, unless you're driving. Don't close your eyes if you're driving. But just picture. Picture a dog. Alright, you have it in your head. What does that dog look like?

I could ask a hundred different people to describe a random dog and those 100 people, unless they happen to live in the same household with the same dog right now, they're going to describe something different. for example, I currently have a six pound long haired chihuahua sleeping in my lap.

⁓ Unfortunately, if you are on YouTube, you can't see her. Of course, if you're just listening to this, you can't see her either. But I have a very small dog asleep in my lap right now. That is a dog. If I were to conjure a mental image of a dog, she would be it.

Someone else who was exclusively raised with hunting dogs. For example, my grandmother on my dad's side is not a huge fan of dogs. They only ever had outside dogs. Those dogs were not chihuahuas. When she thinks of the word dog, she's probably thinking of, a sporting dog of some kind. We're both right. Those are both dogs, but they are going to be completely different.

And if you ask me at different points in my life, we used to have a golden retriever, we used to have a Pomeranian, different day, different dog is going to pop into my hat.

Imagine if you just use the word dog in your book. Every person is going to have a different mental image. Even if you give it an adjective, if it's the nice dog or the cute dog. That's gonna mean something different to every single person. imagine if you say, there's a dog at the house on the corner.

and someone imagines the sweet golden retriever that they had as a child and then the next scene that dog attacks someone violently that is going to completely throw them out of the story because they were thinking golden retriever and I had a golden retriever who literally would have walked across hot coals before hurting a single person so if you tell me

that the dog on page six bites a child on page seven and I'm imagining a golden retriever, that does not compute. And again, there are probably golden retrievers out there who are aggressive, I've never met one, but my life experience, the dog that randomly pops into my head would never do that. And now we have a problem versus if it's a breed that is more known for violence, or if you tell me that the dog is snarling, you don't have to tell me the breed, but if you tell me the dog is snarling already,

that this dog is staring down everyone who passes by. We add that layer of specificity by naming a breed, by describing what the dog looks like, by describing the dog's actions, and suddenly there's no cognitive distance. Because if you tell me that this dog is angry, that it's snarling, I might not have the exact mental picture that you have, but at the very least I know that this is not a nice dog, and I am not going to be thrown out of the story when that dog does something aggressive.

on the page.

We have to be specific because we are not our readers. We are not in their heads. We do not share the same experience, the same background, the same anything. I grew up in Washington state. What a normal neighborhood looks like in Washington state is very different from what a normal neighborhood looks like in Rhode Island. There are different types of trees, different types of architecture. Things are just different. The streets are laid out differently.

these are both states in the same country, we're not even getting into people who are growing up in different countries, in different cultures, but already, if you just say her childhood home was just a normal suburban family home, normal to who? Normal in what state? Normal in what country? You have to be specific. Otherwise,

your reader may be coming up with a completely different mental image than what you intended. They may be having a completely different experience from what you intended because your assumption of what they would see based on the description is not what they actually come away with. Alright, trouble spot number four is with character emotions. This one is very similar, but in this case, you are assuming that

every person is going to have the same reaction to a specific event or type of conflict. So you don't put the emotion on the page because it's obvious the character got an F so they're going to be upset. I don't need to go into detail. I don't need to give the interiority because everyone would be upset by an F. ⁓ But

every person is unique. Not every situation is going to be the same. So we need to put that those emotions on the page. Obviously the know student veiling is a very extreme example but this happens all the time that we assume

Our reaction is the default, it's normal, and that's natural. We all have a little bit of main character syndrome because we only get to exist in our own heads. But we need to make sure that we are conveying what the events of our story mean to our characters. Otherwise, readers won't know how to interpret what's happening. They won't know what's at stake. They won't know what matters or doesn't.

And again, this is another tricky one because we don't want to go too far. We don't want to go into melodrama or doing too much telling. But we do need to find ways to create clarity to signal to readers what the events of the story mean so that our readers can engage with their characters and fully understand what's going on and why it matters.

All right, finally we get to our last trouble spot, number five, those misspelled words, the pesky typos, the words that look similar but just aren't. I'm sure we all know what those look like. I'm not going to explain what a typo is for you, but I did wanna go over some strategies you can use to help your brain see those errors that it might gloss over. So first off, I highly, highly recommend listening

to your text out loud. Use the text-to-speech function on your computer and have the computer read your words to you. The beautiful thing here is that the computer is going to read exactly what's on the page, not what you thought you wrote, and it is miraculous how many errors you will hear that you completely glossed over while reading. The second thing you can do is to use spell check. Use Grammarly, use ProWritingAid,

Typically those AI powered checkers, they're not generative AI, they are AI powered. They are better at catching some of those misused words that a traditional spell checker is going to miss. Another thing you can do is to read your pages in reverse order. I'm going to be honest, I have not done this because the idea made my brain hurt, but it's something I've heard other people have done that works for them. But basically you're not like reading the page backwards, but you're reading

like page 300, starting at the top, going down, go to 299, go down. So you're reading the story out of order in a story context so that you're not paying attention to the story, you're kind of shaking your brain up, but you're still reading the sentences in the right order. Just to clarify, that's the part that made my brain hard. I haven't tried it yet, maybe I will. But the idea here is that you're no longer focusing on the story as a story because you're reading it backwards and that frees up

your brain to focus on the individual sentences, the individual pages, what you actually wrote. Another thing you can do is just change the font. Change the color of the text on your computer.

This one is basically tricking your brain into thinking that it's seeing something new. Because again, your brain knows what's on the page, knows what should be on the page, so it fills in the gaps. If you change the font or change the text color, your brain is going to interpret this as, this is something new, I'm actually going to stop and read it. And finally, you can also print out a copy of your work and read it that way. Again, just like changing the font, you're now taking

that work out of context, telling your brain this is something new and your brain is going to pay a little bit more attention to exactly what's on the page. It's not perfect. Again, if you are a proficient reader, your brain is skipping over words all the time. That's how we read quickly because we're not reading each individual word ever. So I know I used to be a reading specialist, so this is kind of where this comes from, but...

Once you are a proficient reader, you are reading with automaticity. You are not actually consciously processing every word on the page. So you will continue to miss typos. That is why it is so important to use Spellcheck, use that speech-to-text feature, or hire a human copy editor, a human proofreader, someone who is not you, does not have your brain, who can also help find those things.

never forget your brain is incredible, but your brain is only human and it's not perfect. I hope these tips help you to overcome some of the shortcomings of your editor's brain. And if you have other suggestions, I would love to hear them. You can DM me on Instagram or Facebook. I'm at OliviaHelpsWriters and I would love to hear if you have another great tip for helping your brain get better at editing. Alright.

Thank you so, so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. I'm so grateful that you're here, spending your time with me and listening to me rant about writing. If this episode was helpful at all, could you please consider leaving a review, sharing it with another writer or posting about it on your social media? This is a brand new show and my dream is for it to find as many writers who need it as possible and I can really use your help. So please share. would be so, grateful.

you'll be your hero because you get to share this great writing advice with someone else who needs it. All right. Thank you again for being here. Have a wonderful day. Keep writing and keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.