Blogger's Secret

Edit someone else's work at a coworking session

From microcoworking.com:

microCoworking is independent workers and freelancers working side by side and collaborating in a coffee shop instead of a formal coworking space. It’s a great way to try coworking without making a long-term commitment.

One of the ways to get another pair of eyes on your work is to go to a coworking session at your favorite coffee shop. Recruit some friends who are also working on projects that need an editor's eye, and show them your work. The simplest way to get edits done is to sit down at someone else's laptop, and they sit down at your laptop, and you both go through the texts until you're convinced that the work has been improved by you sitting there.

Patti Smith and I sat down upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door for a microcoworking session recently. She edited a resume, and I edited her next beer column. We both used a light touch on the keyboard so as not to make drastic changes, but the final work was better in both cases and it was much easier to look at someone else's words than to see my own over and over again.

Editing your own work is hard - write ahead to make it a bit easier

Editing your own work is hard, perhaps the hardest thing about being a solo blogger writing for yourself. All at the same time you are publisher, editor, writer, and publicist, and the editor in you has to emerge quickly enough to make your work stand out from the vast seas of semi-literate Internet comments that litter the landscape.

If you've been working at something for a while, you won't see the problems in your own writing. Awkward phrasing, inappropriate wording, and missing commas signal that something wasn't copy edited by a competent editor. Paragraphs that don't fit well together suggest that no one has read the whole thing through with a critical eye. It's hard enough to establish your own confident voice without also having a nagging self-critical editor wondering about every phrase.

It's helpful to queue up postings for later publication, and to edit them as you have time to make the writing better. On Friday, write something for Tuesday, and edit the piece that you wrote for Monday. You'll get a little bit of distance between you and the work, and that distance can help quite a bit. If you are far enough ahead on your writing schedule to have a buffer of a few days built up, you will have the opportunity to go back and re-edit the same piece a few times and polish it up in ways that are otherwise hard to maintain on a twice daily deadline.

 

Publish quickly, edit at leisure, make the first version coherent.

Publish quickly. The network rewards the first person to show up on the scene to describe what is going on, and it's important to get a version of that story underway promptly. 

Edit at leisure. The editing process takes time, and it shouldn't be unduly rushed. If necessary, work at it one paragraph at a time, and publish each paragraph after it is finished. Every single piece of work can be improved at any time by an edit.

Make the first version coherent. A first version that stands alone and accurate to itself might just be a concise headline and a lead paragraph. Each subsequent edit can grow the whole thing, but the first thing that hits the wire should be so fully composed that there would be no more reason to keep working on it.