How to be a Better Editor of Your Own Work

But the greatest trauma, the necessary wounding that any poet must undergo, is the detachment from her own work. The beginning after the beginning. We must cut ourselves out and off to move toward a sophisticated sense of the art beyond our sense of self, to develop a historical sense, to see that we write in dialogue with the poetry of the past, to see poems as things, material to be manipulated. This is the big divide, what must be stressed again and again and not just in undergraduate workshops. We must risk a loss of passionate connection to distance ourselves from our work, to grow a little cold to it in order to revise, in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions. Why this and not that? We must develop an ability to read our work skeptically. – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

To become a better editor of your own work,* you have to stop looking at your work as your work. You have to examine it as work. You have to remove yourself from the equation. You have to set aside your ego. You have to shush the whining chorus that doesn’t want to look at the words for the fifth or eighteenth time. If possible, you swat the chorus and kill it. If you don’t, it will suck your blood dry. You will have no motivation to edit your work, and, by then, your ego will have started to play its little games.

You must do away with all those things and become the harsh editor – not the one to whom you will send your edited work and may or may not be more gracious than you but the one you must be. You will, in fact, kill your darlings when they don’t show any love for their surrounding sentences. You will view your work as whole made of separate parts and evaluate how those parts contribute to the whole. Anything that cripples the whole must be cut or improved.

Thus, you settle into your chair. You open your draft. You read it, and you may skim it. Do so. Now you’re ready to read it again. This time, become a glacier and read slowly. Weigh the words. Weigh the sentences. Weigh the paragraphs. Think about them. If you aren’t sure about a sentence or two, let it be. You will come back to it later when you can make a judgment call. Read your work aloud if you must (Aside: You should.). You aren’t going to want to take this step any more than you wanted to read the work slowly, but remove the thought from your head. If needed, take a break before you begin the work of reading aloud. It’s an arduous process, and it’s wearisome. You will, however, be much more satisfied with the work and be proud to reclaim it as your own.

*It must be noted that the editing process has no shortcuts. It never gets easier or faster. It may be why some writers stop writing. Editing one’s writing is hard work.

Image: the Italian Voice (CC BY 2.0)