Battling Familiarity Fatigue in the Editing Process

As I wrap up my revision of the manuscript I've discussed before on this blog, the novelette Regret, I've learned something that could be helpful to those of you deep in the editing process: give yourself something else to work on intermittently so that you are not constantly editing.

Now, if you are paying somebody to edit your work, this will come naturally. You'll get some distance from your work, and then when it's sent back to you with notes, corrections, and mistakes to fix, you'll be able to look at it with fresh eyes and make adjustments. But if you are editing your own work, at least from a rough draft to a revised draft, or doing something deeper, such as a line edit, you can't allow familiarity fatigue to set in and cloud your judgment, or more specifically, dull your inner editor.

The worst mistake you can make as a writer is probably not being aware of your worst mistakes. I'm not trying to sound cute. The question to ask yourself for every manuscript you're working on is: what is this manuscript's biggest repeated mistake that I wasn't aware of during the drafting process? This is such a critical question, because if your biggest mistake is your plot, then you've got a major problem on your hands that can impact the revision of your entire manuscript. Sometimes it can be something just as big, or even more critical: the actual prose, if it is either difficult or boring to read—both difficult to fix, but not impossible. Boring prose kills reader engagement. Difficult-to-read prose (complicated diction or perspective)is also a major mistake, and it's going to take a lot of time to fix.

Mind you, I am not talking about the drafting process. When you are turning an outline into a rough draft, your main concern should be telling a good story that is true to your vision and actually working on it daily or weekly so that you complete it. During this creative stage, you should not be overly self-aware while you're writing, because that can open the door to anxiety and lead to too much self-awareness, which can infiltrate your prose and create a barrier between you and the reader.

Right now, I want to focus only on the revision process—the point at which it is your top priority to take off your rose-colored glasses, divorce yourself from all personal attachments to your manuscript, and read it like the harshest troll who might find it one day. What is it missing? Where did you turn off your inner editor? What part of the story were you so in love with that you ignored its poor technical behavior?

This is a difficult thing to do because you should 'love' your story. You have poured in hours of time and effort that the universe will never give you back. And after spending so much time writing and editing and rereading it, you will likely develop familiarity fatigue. This is why you need to bounce your story off a circle of friends or beta readers. You need time away from it. You need to steal from other people's experience reading your manuscript. If you give your manuscript to friends or a developmental editor and it takes them a few weeks to read, you will have their fresh perspective and then have enough of a gap to bring a fresher perspective of your own.

For me, I am my own developmental editor and my own line editor, at least for now as a self-publisher. Eventually, as I've said before on this blog, my goal is to become traditionally published, and perhaps I'm delaying that journey just a bit by finishing the revision of my novelette. At some point, I will be glad to work with an agent to fix whatever needs fixing in the manuscript I end up submitting. But in the meantime, for my self-published books, I attack familiarity fatigue by working on a couple of other projects while I'm going through the deep editing process.

For example, I'm working on this blog and have to give it time, not just to write it, but to edit and polish it and then publish it in various places to get it "out there." And because it's such a different type of writing, and because I have to spend time on it and away from the manuscript I am currently polishing, I have fresher eyes when I go back to it.

One of the things that really needs a fresh set of eyes and ears (as you listen to your writing in your head) is dialogue, which my little book has a lot of. You want dialogue to both sound natural and move the story forward. Making characters' dialogue go back and forth in a natural way that flows, and that does not make the reader realize you're just making this stuff up, requires a subtle sense of conversational tone and flow.

Every time I have recently made editing changes to dialogue sequences in chapters, I've come back a couple of days later and discovered that the changes weren't enough, or that they had their own mistakes, or that they needed additional cues or better word choice for those particular characters, or that the characters needed to say less because they were sounding too much like plot-speak. Sometimes the lines just didn't flow right, and sometimes the attributions didn't work. There are times when you want to put "he said" or "she said" in the middle, interrupting the dialogue; other times you want to vary your attributions by starting with a description of what the character is doing before they speak. There are just so many nuanced aspects of dialogue that, when you're going through the editing process, you need to make sure you return to those scenes with fresh eyes and ears and try to nail down the flow and the storytelling.

Now, maybe my approach of working on multiple projects at once to help defamiliarize myself with my edits is simply a symptom of my ADD brain. Perhaps it is far better to simply set the story aside and spend the next several days whittling a stick down to a nub, or taking long walks with your dog or spouse. However you approach it, just be aware: the more familiar you are with your manuscript, the less aware you are of its hidden mistakes.