One of the hardest elements of modern novel writing is editing.
I think that’s been true basically forever. Editing is hard. Most novels have at least one or two typos… the novel I’m reading right now (“Promise of Blood”, a Powder Mage book that’s sorta steampunk-fantasy) has more than a few, and it’s a big name, “properly published” book. Nothing serious, a missing quotation mark here, a forgotten capital letter there, but the fact that even books with budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars can make these kinds of mistakes speaks to how hard it is to do editing properly.
And before anyone suggests it: AI makes things much worse, not better. AI editing is worse than no editing most of the time.
Which leaves me having to do the line edits myself. Now, I have an editor, and she’s fantastic, but she’s doing substantive editing: making sure the story and characters make sense and are consistent throughout the book. Think of it as “plot” editing. But the line edits… she does some, but that’s not what I’m paying her for. Were that I could, but editing is expensive, and it’s just not in the budget.
So instead I’m doing them myself. And the problem is that by this point in the novel I’ve read every sentence at least a dozen times. I know, in my head, how every line sounds, what’s coming next, what I wrote before. And therefore my eyes tend not to pay as much attention to what is actually on the page. The best advice I’ve found is to read aloud, and to start the edits from the back of the book and work forward. Anything you can do to jot your brain into actually reading the words, instead of skimming over them.
It’s hard! But I’m trying. I want as few typos in my novel as is possible… I take my work seriously, and I want the people reading my work to enjoy the story, not be distracted by silly mistakes I’ve missed a dozen times.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!