Self-Editing For Fiction Writers

Ruth Zavitz, along with critique group attendees Paula Carr and John Hitchens have just recommend Self-editing For Fiction Writers.

I found self-editing to be a very slippery slope, since the eye and brain are wired to jump over mistakes and see what should be on the page instead of what is.

Had the text-to-speech software TextAloud2 been around back then, I would have used it to listen to my book for an audio proofread and catch those mistakes, but it wasn't.

I remember an email that circulated years ago. It was full of misspellings, but the joke was that no reader saw them until he or she got to the end and the misspellings were pointed out. I remember I found it shocking.

But the brain is very clever and an expert at making sense of misspelled words. All it needs is for the first and last letter of a word to be correct and  it will fill in the rest, especially if you're tired, bored, or have gone over a manuscript so many times you know it by heart.

According to researchers at the University of Toronto, as reported in an article in Science Daily:

"What many people don't realize is that the objects we see are not necessarily the same as the information that reaches our eyes, so the brain needs to fill in those gaps of missing information."

I found that to be utterly true and that, the more familiar I was with a piece of writing (having edited and revised it multiple times), the worse it got. For heaven's sake, I submitted my manuscript with the word psalm misspelled as palm and never perceived the error. So going through that process was a real revelation about how the brain perceives.

I'm definitely going to read the recommended book, but my hard-won advice to anyone who is self-publishing and will not have the benefit of a professional editor going through the manuscript (before it is assigned an ISBN number and finalized for print) and who intends to self-edit for financial reasons is this:

1) Read your entire manuscript out loud, one word at a time while running your finger under each word so you will see mistakes you would otherwise miss, or

2) buy text-to-speech software that will read exactly what's on the page for you so you can hear and then correct the inevitable misspellings, omissions and mistakes in grammar that become invisible due to familiarity.

TextAloud2 is a text-to-speech software that can allow you to listen to your book for an audio proofread and catch mistakes. It converts any text into voice and even to MP3. Not that it works on Windows only.

After editing and editing and missing mistakes right and left and not seeing them until the final proof, then having to pay for corrections, I finally bit the bullet and read through the manuscript using method one. It worked.

If speech recognition software had been available and affordable, however, I would have gone that route. If I ever self-publish another book, I will use method two.

Do either and you will be glad you did.