Blog

Sitting on my bookshelf is a bound, color-photo-copied version of the first book I ever wrote. It is 50 pages of illustrated sci-fi called Wildfire. The premise is that the adults build robots that do everything, and they let them take over, turning themselves into lumps watching TV and the like. The kids dislike this, rebel, steal secret military hardware, and set up a base in the walls of the Grand Canyon.

Mind you, I was 9 years old when I wrote this in 1981 or so. Also, given how the story ends, I’m convinced a child psychologist would have locked me away (spoiler – the kids wind up taking out both the robots and the adults and reclaim and rebuild the world in the end. But killing off all the adults? What does that say about the adolescent mind?)

Over the years, more fictions were written. The Secret Computer World was my first typed story, a personalized derivation of Tron. In High School, I won an award for a technothriller short story I wrote called Secrets Withheld. Why yes, I was reading a lot of Tom Clancy at that point, why do you ask?

Over the next two decades, I wrote stories in fits and starts and completed the first of my epic fantasy Source Chronicles series. After getting an agent but failing to get published, I hired my first editor.

That changed everything.

Edits and editors

There are different degrees and levels of edits you can do on your work, depending on where you’re at and what you need.

The most complex (and expensive) is Developmental Editing. This dives into the structure of your work, tends to be detailed and comprehensive, and goes deeper than corrections as it explores the nature of the narrative overall.

After developmental editing, there’s Line Editing. This picks apart grammar, syntax, language usage, flow, and makes your story stronger. This picks things apart in a way that helps you improve your skill as a writer.

Developmental editing and line editing involve a lot of review, refocus, and can tear your work to shreds. However, the end result is something stronger, clearer, and more readable. Also, you gain insights about the craft of writing and perspective, approach, and more. These are important for early works as you learn your voice as a writer.

Then you get to Copyediting. This is fixing grammar, punctuation, and other mistakes. Your editor looks for typos, improper punctuation, and other things that might not seem huge until the reader comes across them and gets pulled out of your narrative by it.

Lastly, there’s Proofreading. This is a final pass on your work after you’ve gone over the edits that were done, accepted and/or rejected them, made them (or not), and have a finished work ready to give to the world.

My first editor was the most expensive I ever hired. She also fundamentally changed my work, added cohesion, and overall made me a far better writer (and taught me how to edit). That would lead me to better, stronger writing in every format I write in.