Most of us have to edit our own work, at least to some extent. Unless you want to pay a huge sum to editors, you're going to be editing your drafts
and getting them into the best shape you can before turning to someone else for help.
Editing is quite a different skill from writing, though, and it can be a tricky one to master. Here are two hugely important ways to make it much easier:
Tip #1: Separate the Different Stages of Editing
"Editing" encompasses three key stages, and it's best to keep them separate – especially if you're editing a big, complex project like a novel. These stages are:
Stage #1: Revision (literally "re-seeing") – this is when you make radical changes to your first draft. For me, this usually means cutting whole chapters, changing around which characters are in which scenes, switching viewpoints about, and even occasionally erasing characters from the story entirely.
Note: If you're getting someone else to look over your novel, this stage is usually called "developmental editing", but you've hopefully already done a first pass-through yourself.
Stage #2: Line-editing – this is when you go through your
story paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and make smaller tweaks. This is what most people think of as "editing" – rewriting a clunky sentence, switching around some words to avoid unintentional repetition, making a line of dialogue sound more realistic.
Stage #3: Proofreading – this needs
to come last or you risk undoing all your good work by introducing an error as you edit! Proofreading means making sure that you actually wrote what you think you wrote! It's where you catch typos, iron out grammatical errors, and make sure that you're consistent about capitalisation and punctuation.
Of course the stages will overlap a little – as you're rewriting the entire ending to
a scene, you may well fix a clunky sentence or two along the way – but you do need to treat them separately. There's no point line-editing a chapter that you later cut entirely.
Tip #2: Don't (Generally) Edit Straight Onto the Screen
When I start the editing process, I convert my manuscript into a Kindle document and pop it on my Kindle. Then I curl up with a cup of tea and a lot of chocolate and get busy! I read through, making notes about any big changes needed during the revision stage.
I usually repeat the manuscript-onto-Kindle process when I line-edit and/or when I proofread. (At some stages, I do just read through and edit on the computer, as the back-and-forth can eventually become a bit time-consuming once you're several drafts in.)
The big advantage to this is that it helps separate editing and writing, both in your own head and physically on your work itself. It's easy to end up with an editing mess if you start chopping and changing your manuscript (always keep a separate copy of the first draft!) and by reading through the whole thing before enacting any of your planned changes, you can get a good sense of the overall flow of your work.
When it comes to line-editing and proofreading, many authors find that it's easier to see mistakes or clumsy bits of writing when they're reading on a tablet or on paper, rather than on a computer screen. Even something as simple as changing the font of your manuscript can help.
If you have the time and you can stand it, reading aloud is a brilliant way to spot clunky sentences: you're forced to slow down and you can hear the cadence of your writing.
However
you choose to edit, the most important thing is that you do edit! While I absolutely love the first draft stage, with all its exploration and potential, I also really enjoy revising then polishing my work so that it's the best I can make it. (Then it goes to my editor who makes it even better.)
Embrace editing as the part of writing where you get to shape your raw material into something beautiful.
