P2P: Edit Yourself Backwards

Editing your own work is hard for several reasons. You know what's going on, so the picture in your head is complete. When you're reading your own work you don't really know what a brand new reader is seeing with your words. How complete is their picture? You also know the intent of the dialogue, and our brains- being awesome- fill in minor missing words without our eyes ever noticing. Sometimes, when we're really involved in a project, faults of logic can even slip past, causing huge pileups of edits later on.

So if editing yourself is so hard, is there anything you can do?


Edit Yourself Backwards
Have you ever tried reading a sentence backwards? Start at the end of your manuscript and work your way right to left. You'll notice right away that things go a lot slower like this. Making sense of a backward sentence takes a bit of doing- a lot like learning a new language where the nouns and adjectives are swapped. This enforced slower pace will make awkward sentences jump out right away. Missing words and strange tenses will become very obvious.

Edit Yourself Upside Down
This won't work on a tablet or your desktop computer, but print out a few text pages and try it. Flip your work upside down. Like the backwards technique, upside down forces your brain to work harder to translate into right-side-up words. You'll have the sentences in a logical order this way, so pacing, voice, and characters are easier to see.

Edit Yourself In The Mirror
Not going to lie, this one might be more trouble than it's worth. But for those avid readers who swallow doorstoppers in a day, it may come to this. Grab your laptop, get comfortable on the bathroom counter (or in front of a floor-length mirror if you want to be slightly more normal) and read your story in the reflection. With every letter flipped around b's and d's will get confused very quickly. Be methodical. Read word for word. Misspellings, missed punctuation, and all sorts of small weirdnesses will pop out at you, but it will take a long time.

Edit Yourself Out Loud
Every reader has a mental voice or two that carries them along through a text. Many readers, once they get into the story, start seeing it like a movie or hearing it, rather than reading the page. Hide in the farthest corner of the house in a quiet room to yourself, and read your story out loud. With you mouth, not your mental voice. Give the words weight and emphasis. Feel them. Pacing with scream at you this way, but so will awkward sentences and funny homonyms.
Even with all of the above, you won't catch everything. It's the nature of the beast. You will, at some point, need a beta reader or editor (request a quote!) to go over your work and critique or proofread before publication. That's ok! An outside look at things can give you some perspective. Still, in order to produce the cleanest copy you can, try combining all four of the above techniques at once. That'll slow your inner reader down.