Three Hacks to Make Editing Your Book Less Stressful - from a Professional Editor

Let’s be honest: editing a book can be really stressful. Much more so when it’s your book, let alone if it’s your first book.

I’m a professional editor, but I wasn’t always, and I know from personal experience that trying to edit your work can make you feel like pulling your hair out.

Good news: it doesn’t have to be like that.

Here’s three ways to make editing your book go more smoothly—plus a bonus at the end!

1. Do your editing in rounds.

Sometimes, when you scroll through your manuscript, you’re hit by an overwhelming rush of to-dos. There are so many changes to make—and maybe worse, so many areas where you’re not sure whether you should make changes. Trying to sort it all out can feel impossibly daunting.

The good news is, you can sort it all out.

The key? Take your editing one round at a time.

Next time you open your manuscript, instead of reading through and bouncing around and trying to fix everything you see, take a deep breath and just pick one thing to focus on. Then read through the whole manuscript focusing just on that issue. If you notice anything else, leave a note to yourself to deal with it later, so you don’t forget, but once that’s done, get back to the task at hand.

Here are some examples of great things to focus on in an early round of editing:

• Plot: Does it make sense? Are there any plot holes? How’s the pacing? Is there anything that’s just too easy for your characters—or the opposite, anything unbelievably hard?

• Character: Do the characters stay in character? Do their motivations make sense? What are their storylines? Do they have enough to do, or are there large swaths of the manuscript where some of them are just hanging out in the background? One editing technique that’s really powerful is to do a different editing pass for each major character.

• Structure: Especially if you’re writing nonfiction, this one is key. Does the book start in a place that’s accessible to someone who’s new to the topic? Do the topics lead into each other well? Do any of the sections build on each other? Is there a lot of jumping back and forth?

You don’t have to do everything all at once. In fact, you shouldn’t do everything all at once.

One thing at a time, and it will all feel so much more manageable—and the results will be so much better, too. In the words of Anne Lamott, “Just take it bird by bird.”

2. Reward yourself to build positive associations.

Fun fact about me: I used to have pet rats. And having pet rats honestly felt like it really deepened my understanding of human beings, because rats really are so much like us.

(If you’re making a face right now, listen—pet rats are little darlings. Don’t fall for the anti-rat propaganda!)

Whenever you’re trying to get a pet rat to do something it doesn’t want to do—especially something it finds stressful or overwhelming, like, say, giving it little scritches for the first time—the easiest way to make it happen is to give a pet rat a treat.

Like us, rats are highly intelligent, social, and opinionated mammals. We have a common ancestor, and like all mammals, we evolved along some similar lines.

Meaning that human nervous systems also find bribes very effective!

That’s especially true if those bribes are food. Like, say, our favorite sweets.

If you make your little treats food, though, it goes deeper than just “Ooh, thing I like.” That’s because we have a part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the “rest-and-digest response.” The stomach and the brain are inextricably linked—so when you eat food, you are quite literally signaling to your brain, “It’s okay, we’re safe, we should calm down.”

If editing (or writing for that matter) is making you stressed, munching on your favorite snacks while you work is genuinely a great way to calm yourself down. It also builds positive associations with editing over the long term, so that editing (or writing) becomes something your brain looks forward to.

After all, it knows that it might get a treat!

3. Change the color of Track Changes to something that’s not red.

If you’re using Track Changes (and I would 100% recommend that you use Track Changes if you’re writing a book, because it’s an incredibly thorough way to track the changes you make to your manuscript; tutorial here), then you probably get stressed out sometimes looking at a page covered in red ink. This is natural! The human brain is literally drawn to the color red more than almost any other color—part of why stoplights are so good at getting your attention.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you could edit your book without feeling like you just got an essay back from your super strict high school English teacher?

Good news: You can change the color of all those annotations to literally anything you want. Personally, I have Track Changes set to a nice aqua—bright, noticeable, and soothing. This way, my authors don’t have to see a page covered in red, either!

Having your work edited is nothing to be embarrassed about—mistakes are literally inevitable when you’re writing something as long as a book, even for professional editors.

So help your brain calm down and get with the program. Instructions on how to change the color of Track Changes, annotations, and comments can be found here.

Bonus: Hire a professional editor!

Hah, okay, I’m biased here, obviously. But it’s also genuinely a good idea, especially if editing feels overwhelming to you. You can outsource a lot of the stressful stuff.

Editors don’t just fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation. (Though we also definitely do that, and do it well!) We also make sure that your writing is clear, engaging, and well structured. We’re there to help make sure that everything flows well and makes sense—two of the things that can be hardest to judge about your own writing!

If you do want to hire a professional editor, you can find me at calvieditorial.com. Wink, wink.

If that’s not of interest to you (or your budget), definitely make sure to run some nice and thorough spelling and grammar checks. They won’t catch everything, but they’re also a heck of a lot of help.