Editing and proofreading your own work can be hard. If you’re like me, then you see your words on the screen or on paper the way you intended to write them, and you can’t easily see the mistakes. Which means you can’t fix them.
What can be even harder is judging the literary merits of the story. Is is interesting, suspenseful, engaging? Is it original? Does it have any discernible theme? Do the characters have depth? And so on and so on. In other words, is the story any GOOD?
I usually don’t know. And where to submit the work? It can feel like throwing darts in a dark room.
I totally agree. When I started writing the YA fantasy novel I’m working on, I thought the story was great, but then how do you really know? Well, I found a few other people to read it, people I knew. They liked it, and then I got brave and posted a few chapters on a writers’ forum. Wow, was that scary. Anyway, people had differing opinions on the writing, but they all thought the story had merit.
Then I decided to find some beta readers. I thought it was pretty polished and that nothing was confusing and that everything flowed together smoothly. I was wrong. There were things I just couldn’t see anymore. I was too involved, too close to the action, so to speak.
Anyway, now I’m editing…again. I hate editing. I have to keep reminding myself that it should all be worth it in the end.
This is always tough — evaluating our own work. I’ve handed what I thought was a finished piece to a friend (who happens to be a tech writer and has mad editing skills) only to get it back so marked up in red it almost hurt! (Of course, I appreciated every stroke of that red pen.)
I agree, it’s always a good idea to have someone else read a piece, especially if you can find someone who will be brutally honest. (Although, just because a story doesn’t appeal to one person, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.)