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I Really Don’t Like Proof-Reading And Editing My Own Work!

As you might have guessed from the fact that I write a blog about writing, I really love writing! But you know what I don’t love? PROOFREADING AND EDITING!

When I’m writing, it’s like my brain is on fire; the story is pouring out of me and I’m struggling to get it on the page as fast as I can  imagine it. But then you finish writing, and you have to go through your hastily scribbled mess and fix it up; make sure it’s logically consistent, that the prose flows nicely, and that there are no typos. The whole time I’m doing this, my brain is aching to just get on and write the next story, or to go and see what cake I have in the house; anything but actually concentrate on the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

But proof reading and editing are important, right? Well, yes, I admit that they are important. As I said earlier, my first draft is usually a bit of a mess, and without any proofreading, I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting other people see my work. But I do think that the importance of proofreading and editing can be overstated; particularly if they become a barrier to you publishing your work.

I’m always seeing blogs and articles that say ‘Don’t ever release your work unless you’ve had it looked at by a professional editor!’ and it makes you feel like unless you do this, the world will literally end. But I really don’t have the money to get my work seen by a professional editor. I’ve recently started a business that specialises in language teaching to adults and in the first three months of this year it made a loss of £20.00, so I’m not exactly rolling in cash! As a result, I edit my work as best as I can and I get my wife to read what I write too. I get some valuable advice from her that I do use to make changes to my work, but after that, I’m done! So, sure, my work hasn’t been seen by a professional editor, and I’m sure that there are still issues with the writing, the plot, and a few typos left in the things I write when I publish them, but so what? I know that they’ve had a proofread so that they’re not disastrously bad, so why should I punish myself with six more rounds of proofreading and editing when this is something that I’m supposed to do for FUN? I’m too excited to get my work out into the world and move onto the next story idea to do that! 

At the end of the day, the work I put out is good enough for some people to have got some enjoyment out of it even though it’s not at a standard that some might deem professional, and I’m really happy with that. So, if you want to spend hours painstakingly editing your work, you go for it, if you want to pay a professional editor to look at your work, you go for it, but if you just want to have fun writing something and then put it out in the world without really checking it over, you should go for it too. There’s never just one right way to do things, so do them your way!


My short story collection, Talking to Lobsters, is available here: https://tinyurl.com/talkingtolobsterscollection 

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