Sometimes You Need to Give It a Rest

We heartily recommend taking a break from your freshly completed manuscript before jumping in on edits. It’s not hard to find this advice from other sources as well, and for good reason.

Many good reasons, actually.

Editing takes a different mindset than the initial writing. Give yourself enough time to shift gears. If you rush the job, you’ll find that not only are the words themselves too familiar, but you’ll have distractingly vivid recall the act of writing them. The choices you made at the time will still feel like the only way things can be.

Have you ever shown a pristine page to a friend and had them zero in immediately on a typo? It’s a forest-and-trees problem. To gain the vantage to really see your own work, you have to hike out of the woods. And that takes time.

Critical distance is necessary at all levels, not just the mechanicals. Does your action sequence make a reader’s pulse race? Is the central tragedy suitably heartbreaking? Do the plot threads all tie together? You won’t be able to answer such questions unless you can approximate an outside perspective.

It’s not merely a question of time, though. Just staring into the middle distance for some magic number of days won’t prep your mind. Focusing intently on a different project is, for us, the best way to train ourselves to pretend we don’t know how our own story goes. We’re typically juggling two or three novels at a time, so while the latest one rests we devote ourselves passionately to one of the others. Concentrating on music or painting or home renovations could achieve the same effect. Whatever you choose, lean into it so hard you don’t have any spare brain cells where overfamiliarity can linger.

A writing partner is someone to pass the time with while your prose is in repose.