D. J. Herda

When I was a kid going to college to learn to become a rich and famous novelist, I was stunned to learn that one of the pre-enrollment requirements for "Novel Writing 101" was "Journalism 101, 102, and 103." Not just one semester of learning to write what I had no intentions of using ever, but three!

I tried everything I could to bypass that requirement, including begging the head of the fiction department to give me a pass. Thank God he turned me down. Learning to write like a journalist (and think and talk and interview like one) was exactly the kind of iron-fisted self-discipline I needed to learn to apply to my fiction writing. And the single most essential thing I learned from those courses was how to write under deadline.

I was reading an article the other day about the importance of authors self-editing their work before sending it out for publication, and I ran into this gem: “An author [singular noun] should always aim to make their [plural pronoun] book the best it can be. Unless we [third person] are literary geniuses, you [second person] can’t get away from some element of human feedback.”

Is he kidding? Fortunately, he got one thing right. He nailed the importance of self-editing on the head! Unfortunately, he failed to heed his own advice.

This is a good example of how easy it is to miss little things in our work. Sometimes, authors believe that a publisher’s editors will clean up the book, so why spend any more time than necessary on that boring, unglamorous chore?

The answer: Because you’re a professional who wants a professional-looking product before it ever leaves your desk. Professional-looking products take time and energy to produce. Here are a few tips to help you self-edit your book.