Movable Type and Editing

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For every writer there is a wonderful moment you look forward to. It is when you finally finish your first novel. The delight of writing ‘The End’ and knowing that it’s done! The joy! The chance now to send it to friends to read and to publishers to publish! All that will immediately happen.

Sadly, that isn’t what happens. The hard truth is that when you ‘finish’ your novel, all you’ve really done is finish your first draft. Which will lead to editing and revisions and possibly major rewrites. And that will give you your second draft. This can go on many times. This is before you try to publish it…

You could, feasibly, blame 15th century Johannesburg Gutenberg (for more about him read this page online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg) for all this heartache. Why? Because he invented the first movable type press in Europe and that led to mass printing, newspapers, books and so on. In many ways he could be looked upon as a hero, but others might say that printing has its demons and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that editing is one of those. 

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to improve how you edit your written masterpiece. You can read books about it, of which there are many, but they won’t give you another pair of eyes to weed out mistakes.

Another option is to do a course. I myself attended an online zoom class with Ella Micheler, an editor/translator/publisher via The National Centre of Writing to get some tips. Ella was very friendly and good at explaining the different elements behind getting a manuscript print ready.

After going though the basics of what editing must be done before a manuscript can go to an agent or publisher, we then considered how after the basic proofreading your script will then need more complicated editing. The sort that requires experienced editors to make it work. I’m talking about Conceptual Editing and Developmental Editing and Structural Editing. If you want more information on these take a look at this blog by Reedsy explaining them.

If this sounds complicated, I think it is. Especially if you aren’t trained or have years of experience. Which is why, if you don’t have an agent or publisher already in place, it might be time to pay to get your work professionally edited.

What I’ve learned from doing two degrees and many fiction writing courses of different time durations, is that there’s a whole lot of editing to do before any your written work is finished. And especially if it’s a novel to be printed. Which is absolutely the correct thing to do. Even if your novel isn’t printed onto paper (as many aren’t these days) and exists instead as a Ebook online, no one wants to read a story that is full of mistakes.

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