Skip to main content

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 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Book Reviews I've Written!

Hi all! Below is a reposting of some book reviews I wrote for my Goodreads page. I hope they're useful! Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (5/5 stars) I've got to be honest from the get-go: Gideon the Ninth is amazing! This is the best book I've read in YEARS! The main characters are all so perfectly crafted, and you love them all, even if the titular Gideon is, in the words of author Tamsyn Muir 'a dickhead'. The writing just leaps off the page and never gets in the way of the story it's trying to tell. It's written with such sharp humour, too, that I was often caught laughing out loud on the bus. I would kill to be able to write like that! The universe that the story takes place within is incredibly original; I've only ever read stories where necromancy is featured as 'that thing you NEVER do', until, of course, somebody goes and does it, with catastrophic consequences. In the world of Gideon, however, necromancy is the only magic game in town, an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Representation And Writing Queer Characters

When I came out, I went from every sci-fi/fantasy book I read containing a whole bunch of versions of the person I thought I was/was trying to be, to not seeing myself anywhere, whether that was in books, films, or on TV.  There are beginning to be some great examples of trans/non-binary representation out there in the world of speculative fiction, including the Once & Future series by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, and Nicole Maines’ stint on Super Girl as Dreamer, but the trans/enby community is so diverse that we’ve got a long way to go, before we can all see ourselves reflected in the stories we love.  As a lesbian trans woman who is early in her transition and hasn’t had voice training, I certainly haven’t ever seen someone like me in a sci-fi or fantasy story, but perhaps more importantly, there is a real dearth of trans masc peeps, trans BIPOC peeps, disabled trans peeps, neurodivergent trans peeps, and all non-binary peeps out there (not an exhaustive list) at...
Post a Comment
Read more