Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos

Greetings fellow readers and writers!

Today I thought I’d write about something that has been on my mind lately. Self-editing/proofing for the indie writer. This will be a four-part guide and while I’d love to jump right into my “fool-proofing” system, I feel a brief exploration into the psychology of editing/proofing is in order. Therefore, this first post will concentrate on why editing and proofing are important, especially for a new author, and why we are incapable of seeing our own mistakes even though they are right in front of our eyes.

Note to readers: This guide is specifically for copy/line editing and proofing. Not for editorial/developmental/structural editing.

Why Editing and Proofing are Important:

It should come as no surprise that as a writer, I spend a lot of time reading. Well, it so happens in my continuous quest in marketing my work, I have been reading a bucket load of other indie books. While I have found some new authors who have really put an effort into editing/proofing their novels, I’ve also run into more than a few with glaring issues throughout their entire novel. Now, I’m not talking about a few errors throughout a book. This is expected even in high-profile traditionally published novels. It happens, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never read a book without at least one or two errors. That’s all well and dandy. What I’m talking about are books that the author has published with an error or more on every single page!

This is problematic for several reasons:

The loss of immersion as a reader is taken out of the story by a glaring typo/continuity error/grammatical sin.
The loss of “flow” in cadence and structure, but also the experience.
A loss of respect. If your work isn’t polished and professional, you have not taken your own work seriously. Why should the reader take it seriously if you, the creator, have not?
Losing the reader forever. Honestly, I feel my time was wasted trying to establish what these authors were attempting to convey through the muck and mire. It also took much more effort to read than needed because of it. They wasted my time because they didn’t put in their own time to make sure it was ready. I can guarantee, with all the writers and books out there to choose from, I won’t be picking up another of these author’s books.

While it seems common practice within the writing world to insist that self-editing is unprofessional and if you want to be a serious writer, you need to hire an editor. This argument holds merit in terms of the limitations of a writer to actually see their work (more about this coming up), but I disagree with the idea that a serious writer cannot self-edit/proof their own work.

I will state a disclaimer right now before I ruffle too many feathers: Hiring a professional and high-quality editor is absolutely worthwhile. Especially as it frees up time for the writer to concentrate on content creation and can also establish a great working relationship while providing a powerful source of learning. However, I refuse the idea that to be a professional writer; hiring an editor is necessary.

As an indie author, I consider myself a professional, and the work I put out to the world polished and of high-quality. Due to this, and the fact I was indeed monetarily deficient (Straight up broke, son!) I took it upon myself to develop an economic and efficient system for editing Future Furious in a way that allowed me to make sure I would not fall prey to the dreaded psychological effect of generalization.

What do I mean by generalization? Excellent question my savvy reader!

The Psychology of Typos:

Generalization is the common phenomenon that happens with higher-order brain processes when your brain is sacrificing detail for the sake of using less processing power. A good example of this is when you look at a tree. Your brain is not detailing every single leaf on those branches. That would take a massive amount of processing power and would be extremely inefficient. Interestingly, I have read that this process has been linked to the Default Mode Network or DMN (your ego), the part of the brain responsible for tuning up performance and creating automaticity for everyday tasks, and also the part of the brain that researchers believe psychedelics shut off.

Whoa, man! Those leaves are so… GREEN!

That’s right, they’re so green and detailed because you are actually seeing them for what they are without the DMN’s generalization interference.

Well, the same thing happens as a writer. When you write, you have created essentially a map of meaning on paper (or screen, or what have you) as well as one within your mind. As you scour your writing for mistakes, your brain is essentially overlapping this actual map and the mental map. Because of this, you are literally incapable of seeing typos in some cases because your brain is showing you something different from what is actually right there in front of you.

Pretty crazy, right?

It’s the reason I would harp on my students to always have someone else read their work before handing it in, and/or read it out loud (a technique we’ll get into in later parts of this guide), and/or even better, have someone read it to them out loud. This is the psychology of the typo, and in order to make sure your editing efforts are not in vain and your passionate, amazing story is polished and shiny, there are really only two routes available.

Hire an editor.
Use a systematic approach that will allow you to bypass generalization.

The problems I have with hiring an editor/proofer are:

Anyone I would trust to do the job to my own professional standards will cost more moola than I’m prepared to throw down at this early stage in my career.
Anyone who would do it on the cheap, I cannot trust to do a better job than myself. Therefore, if I hired someone, my overly neurotic self would just end up combing through the writing anyway while relentlessly tearing myself down for wasting money that could have been better spent elsewhere. You know, like a sweet cover design… or Funyuns.

While I am looking forward to the time in my career that I can responsibly hire a brilliant editor, in the meantime, I am more than happy with my systematic approach, and I am confident in its effectiveness. I also feel that by using this approach, I have a better understanding of my own writing and personal style by being so close and intimate with it. Self-editing has given me insight into what I do and why I do it.

Interestingly, I feel this draws a parallel with generalization and the DMN. When we write, when we practice the act of writing, there is automaticity to it. That automaticity is what the DMN is specifically in charge of and designed for. However, when you delve deep into what is actually going on with your own writing and process, deconstructing and reconstructing, you really get a look at the nuts and bolts beneath the surface. Finally seeing what’s really there. To give you an example of one of these nuggets of wisdom I found within my own style, I tend to use language to convey that things are moving together and happening simultaneously within the story. This I feel works really well to convey a sense of cinematic scope and movement within the writing and while I’m certainly not the only writer to do this, I feel the realization has brought me closer to my writing, to the story, and even to my characters. Just knowing I lean on these types of structures allows me to analyze and evaluate on a deeper level than if I were just doing it automatically.

That’s the end of Part 1 for the Fool-Proofing guide. Join us next time when we dive into editing checklists and manuscript cheat sheets. Until then, happy writing and word wrangling!