At Write the World, we talk a lot about the importance of giving and receiving peer reviews to help strengthen your writing craft. But what about when it comes to editing your own work? Even when you have plenty of feedback from others to consider, you’ll still need to rely on your own judgement for much of the editing process. So to give you some ideas on what might work best for you when it comes to editing, we’re taking a look at how some of our young writers and guest judges approach it. Read on for their tips!
When to Edit:
Here’s a few different editing routines that our young writers have found work for them:
- Write Fast, Edit Slow: Our 2019 Food Writing Competition Winner Iris Joo (Australia) finds it best to get her ideas out on paper as fast as possible (or, as she says, in a “caffeine-induced frenzy”), then sort it out during editing. She likes to “just get the words down” then “rip it apart later” (or, as we prefer to think of it, “lovingly improve upon it later.”)
- Edit as You Go: LuLu Kimmel Miner (United States), winner of Best Peer Review for our 2019 Op-Ed Competition, opts for editing as she writes: “I edit usually as I go along, slowly but surely, rewriting the intro several times.”
- Take a Break: Another common self-editing method is to step away from your piece before returning to edit it. As Shannon Piazza (United States) says about her winning piece for our 2017 My December Competition, “I started writing and got it all out. Then I let it sit for a day. After that, I went back over and looked closer at my word and sentence choices. Then I let it sit again. When I came back, I looked at the language again, and changed anything that I felt needed changing.” The winner of our 2017 Novel Writing Competition, Soo Young Yun (South Korea), agrees: “After vigorously editing my writing, I tend to let my work sit for a few days in order to read it again later with fresh eyes.”
How to Edit:
So once you’ve got an editing routine that make sense for you, what do you actually do? What do you look for? What do you work on? Here are some suggestions from our young writers and guest judges:
- Think Like a Reader: This is where writing peer reviews comes in handy, because it teaches you to apply the same questions and suggestions you offer your peers to your own work. As Vani Dadoo (India), former Peer Ambassador and winner of our 2018 Travel Writing Competition, says “Being a Peer Ambassador … taught me how to look at my own writing objectively. You begin to learn how to emphasize the strong parts of your writing and how to elaborate on the vague or misleading parts. Sometimes, you even start to think from the perspective of the reviewer: What will intrigue the reader more? What will puzzle the reader?”
- Aim for Concision and Clarity: Former My December guest judge and author Melissa DeSilva strives to edit her piece “until I can say what I need to say with the least amount of words.” She also suggests making sure a piece is as “clear as possible… There’s no point in writing the most beautiful sentences if the overall meaning of them is unclear to the reader.”
- Refine the Language: When Cath Crowley—YA author and former Novel Writing guest judge, edits—she makes sure to give the language a final polish: “I look through my work for the obvious things—word repetitions, sentences that sound wrong in terms of rhythm, spelling errors. I also look for descriptions that are clichéd, for dialogue that could be inner dialogue because it’s not serving a purpose, or it doesn’t show conflict, or it doesn’t sound natural.”
Whether you are a young writer or a published author, finding an editing routine that works is a process of trial and error—we hope some of these approaches and ideas will resonate with you as you explore and discover your own practice! Just remember, no matter what approach you take, it’s important to give yourself time to edit. It’s only through letting your ideas percolate and seeing your work with fresh eyes that you can figure out not only what you really want to say, but the best way to say it.
