If you’ve ever made the assumption that great writers reach an ability level where editing the work becomes optional. Or if you think that editing is for the rookies, the up-and-comers, the amateurs. Or if you think the professionals just vomit perfect prose and no longer any use for a mop. You’re way off.
Writing Routines has interviewed Bestselling Novelists, Pulitzer Prize winning historians, Blockbuster Hollywood screenwriters, Poet Laureates, Congressional Speech Writers, Comedians, Journalists, Bloggers, and Songwriters. They haven’t just given us their time. And if you’re a writer, you know how protective writers are of their time. So, first, we thank them for that. But perhaps more valuable than their time, what they’ve really given us (or frankly, what we’ve stolen from them) is their trade secrets.
And these aren’t “these might work” trade secrets. You don’t win the Pulitzer with a notebook full of “these might work” secrets. Beneath each title listed on the New York Times bestseller is an army trained, battle tested arsenal of tactics and methods that is the writer’s routine. The writer’s we’ve interviewed have each honed theirs. They differ to varying degrees. Some have morning rituals. Some don’t. Some need utter silence. Some don’t. Some need an hour of midday meditation or exercise. Some don’t. But there’s one thing that holds up unanimously. There’s one part of the routine that every writer carves out time for, that no writer dismisses, that no writer is so good to do without.
The well-documented off-the-court regiments of great athletes like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan come to mind for some reason. It is similar though. Kobe and Jordan are the greats because of the work we fans don’t see. That’s what the great writers do. For Kobe and Jordan, how they did it differed but that they did it didn’t. That’s true for the great writers too.
If you’re a writer, you’re an editor. You need to be. And a once through skim to right click on the red squiggly underlining misspellings does not count as editing. The great writers are thorough. They take out the magnifying glass. They look through the scope with a sniper’s eye. They dissect their drafts ruthlessly and repeatedly. Then they might even have a pair of trusted outsider eyes dissect it much the same.
The thoroughness, the diligence, the utter unavoidable importance of editing is universal among great writers. The methods vary, so if you have been neglecting the editing process in your own work, steal some of the tips below. Start taking editing as serious as the greats.
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“I tend to edit heavily and repeatedly as I go along, so I don’t make the distinction, at least by myself. For the books that I’ve written for a larger public, however, I’ve had the help of an immensely gifted editor (Alane Mason, at Norton), so there I do separate out the tasks: in effect my own writing/editing; and then a further editing after receiving her suggestions. I tend to hate the latter experience, though I recognize that it is almost invariably good—a bit like swallowing disagreeable but essential medicine.
– Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard Professor, author of The Swerve, that landed on the bestseller lists and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award
“It [editing] rests on three passes. The first pass is when you write the best chapter you can. The second pass comes later once the whole book (or whole part of the book containing the chapter) is done. During this pass, I come back to the chapter on my computer and cut and tighten. The final pass is when I read through a printed version of the chapter on paper. Reading on paper is necessary if you’re going to root out odd constructions or minor errors.”
– Cal Newport, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deep Work
“When I’m away from the laptop, I’m mentally revising and rethinking almost constantly. When I come back, I start by going to the beginning of the chapter, and I read and revise everything I’ve done so far. There has to be a better way, but I can’t help it. When I’m done with the chapter, I print it and go through it with a pencil, and do the same for the entire manuscript when it’s done. I also read the finished work aloud. That’s the best way to catch mistakes and infelicities and to refine the rhythm of the language.”
–Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles, author of Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
“After I’ve written a significant amount, I’ll edit that section with paper and pen, rearrange, etc. On some level, I’m taking dictation for the unwritten script that’s in my head, and I know when something sounds right or sounds wrong. When it’s time for something resembling a final draft, I’ll read it aloud to Margaret and find all sorts of new mistakes and room for improvement.”
– John Avlon, author of Washington’s Farewell and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast
“I write the intro, print it out, and edit it. Get it passable and close to what I wanted. Then I wrote the first chapter, and did the same. Then once I had a clear sense of what this book is going to be I wrote the first third, edited and then wrote the second third. But here, I would combine Part I and II and edit them together. Then Part I, II and III. So it’s sort of recursive. The beginning is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And as a result, I have interacted with the material so much at this point that the latter chapters need far less editing. By the time I’ve finished I’ve gone through the book dozens and dozens of times.”
– Ryan Holiday, author, a ghost-writer, a columnist, an essayist, a Grammy-award winning producer, a book marketer, and a book connoisseur, providing monthly reading recommendations going on 8 years.
“What I like to do is edit a chapter before I move onto the next one…I would write 20-25 pages of a chapter in draft form, and the goal would just be to write the pages knowing that they were terrible. Some writers just keep on going, and they write the whole novel that way. But I stopped because I wanted to pay a lot of attention to the prose so I needed to make the prose as perfect as I could before I moved forward. I would just write the chapter to get the plot down and go back and revise a couple of times before I moved onto the next chapter…So I only needed to revise that draft one more time before I turned it over to my agent. Then when my editor got his hands on it we revised it one more time after that.”
– Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, a NYT bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winning novel
“I’ll usually take out the first and last paragraph to see what the story looks like without them…Taking out the first paragraph always throws me more quickly into the story and into my “voice” and the first paragraph was just filler while I got used to the topic. Then I might write the whole piece again. Or I might write paragraphs over. Then I take out extra words. Then extra syllables. And I don’t like punctuation except for the period.”
– James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself listed as one of USA Today’s “Best Business Books of All Time.” Reinvent Yourself was #1 book overall on Amazon.com
“For me, editing is as important as writing. No, probably even more important. I’ve never been able to sit down and write the perfect sentence. I re–write constantly – it’s almost like being a carpenter sanding a piece of wood, again and again, until it’s perfectly smooth. My best and oldest friend is my first editor; she’s ruthless, clever and amazing. I don’t trust anyone like her.”
– Andrea Wulf, bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, The Brother Gardeners, Founding Gardeners, Chasing Venus, and the co-author of This Other Eden.
“Once I have a rough draft, I print it out, read it over once, formulate some general idea about how things should go, and then go through it sequentially at a rate of about ten pages a day. I only make changes to the manuscript in the morning, but in the afternoon I look over the pages I’ll work on the next day and make a lot of notes. When I’ve gone through the whole book, I take a break—a week or two at first, longer when I get closer to a final draft—and then I do it again. And again and again.”
– Aaron Their, Author of The Ghost Apple, Mr. Eternity, and The World is a Narrow Bridge
“I try to write deliberately as I go so that even my first drafts will be presentable and polished, but the most useful thing for editing is always getting feedback from people you trust. For books, it’s always good to exchange feedback with my co-author, Jimmy Soni; for academic work, there are always works-in-progress seminars and conferences to take advantage of for feedback.”
– Rob Goodman, a speechwriter for Congressman Steny Hoyer and Senator Chris Dodd. His book, A MIND AT PLAY was Winner of the Neumann Prize for the History of Mathematics and Named a best book of the year by Bloomberg and Nature
“I’m not a great editor of my own work in the traditional sense because I edit as I write. When you look at my first drafts, they have the polish of something much further down the line in the writing process. Because of that, I am not the best at identifying if something is slowing the narrative down, or if I’m off topic, or anything that I would normally identify immediately in someone else’s writing. So I have to rely on other people’s notes and trust that they know what the hell they are talking about.”
– Nils Parker, editor, ghostwriter and story consultant for creatives of all stripes. As an editor, Nils has been behind multiple New York Times & Wall Street Journal bestsellers
“Editing is little like being a verbal sniper—you’re going back to readjust your aim continually. So I don’t necessarily like to get too far in front of myself without having edited the piece. Sometimes I’ll reread and edit 30 times or more. (Of course, you’ll probably still catch typos in this writing!)”
– Dr. Barbara Oakley, bestselling author of A Mind for Numbers and former Army Captain
“I edit every morning, every day. Cut cut cut cut cut cut — as much as I can. I want my stuff lean and mean, with no wasted words. I think that’s a common mistake many writers make. They think readers love their words. Maybe. But in my case I always feel the shorter, the better.”
– Bryan Burrough, Author of six books—including the critically-acclaimed Barbarians at the Gate—he’s also a winner of the Loeb Award for financial journalism and Vanity Fair writer.
“I need to step away from what I wrote before I can edit it intelligently.…I do a 20-minute sauna session and bring only a notepad and a pen with me. Some of the best ideas I’ve had in recent memory occurred to me in the solitary, stifling environment of that sauna. As I sit there sweating profusely, I’ll think through what I wrote in the morning. As Stephen King put it, “boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”
– Ozan Varol, an author, a tenured law professor, and a rocket scientist. He is the author of The Democratic Coup d’État, served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission, and declared a public enemy in Turkey as a result of the arguments in his book
“I go from being kind to myself to being brutal. Every word is suspect, every sentence a potential embarrassment. Every idea has to be interrogated, every bit of dialogue examined, every scene put the to the test of “What does this contribute to the story? Why? Do I need this scene? What does it add?” It is a very different mindset, much more punishing. I’m way grumpier when I’m editing because I’m reminded daily of how crap I am at my job until I start editing.”
– Sabaa Tahir, bestselling author of a YA fantasy series that began with the smash debut hit, An Ember in the Ashes, and was followed by A Torch Against the Night, and A Reaper at the Gates
“I print the beast, grab my sharpie, and go somewhere other than behind my computer. I read, mark, sketch, slash, draw arrows, and slash on the page.”
– Joe Ballarini, author of A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting and the writer of the movie, Dance of the Dead and the upcoming My Little Pony: the Movie
“I feel like I need to be two conflicting people to get through the editing process:
1)Mr. Bozo The Punching Balloon: The smiling zero defensiveness guy who just looooooooves constructive feedback, never gets angry, and always pops back up.
2) Mr. Angry Gorilla On A Tiny Keyboard. That angry, over confident, assertive writer guy who unleashes words on a page in the strong, spirited way a master artist splatters paint on a canvas. He does whatever he wants so get out of his way.”
…Remember: Be Bozo and Kong.”
– Neil Pasricha, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and three other books. His books have sold over a million copies worldwide.
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