Creative Editing Techniques explores different strategies for editing your fiction writing which combine together to give you the cleanest ‘oven-ready’ publishing draft possible. These strategies include visual and auditory processing techniques, insider tips from the publishing world, and exercises borrowed from drama education to give your work a fully-rounded editorial boost.

This article examines the dreaded typo. It’s often the first thing readers will write about in a bad review because it really spoils their experience if they keep spotting errors everywhere, taking them out of the story world. The sad fact of the matter is that we, as writers, are often the worst people for making and not recognizing these errors. We write so fast in our excitement that we type letters all over the place, and then we know our story so well that we don’t see errors, even when they’re present! I’m going to walk you through three essential processing strategies to catch as many errors as possible in your own work, and they’re surprisingly easy to do:

1 – The Breakaway

To break the cycle of being over-familiar with your work, take a good long break from it. Read something else. Write something else. Get some new words into your head for a while, even in another language if you can. Turn your brain off from your work, anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days, then go back and read a section. Once your memory’s not fresh enough to fill in the gaps automatically, you’ll be able to see errors far more clearly. This is part of the reason that fresh readers often pick up errors that we never see because everything is brand new to them!

2 – Physical Change

Some people feel really sinful about printing and ‘wasting’ paper these days, but I still produce a full physical copy for editing. Not only that, but I change the font and size of the text from my digital copy. Larger, clearer text breaks the automatic visual processing you have in your head of what your book looks like, tricking your brain into thinking that it’s reading something new. This new-font printout is particularly good for spotting end-of-line errors because it’s the very last word on a typed line that our eyes tend to skip over when we’re reading.

3 – Loud and Proud

This processing technique comes from the world of drama. Reading our work out loud activates a different part of the brain because we not only take the words in, but we translate them into physical speech. When you read your writing out loud, you’ll find that you hear mistakes even if you can’t see them, and your lips will stumble to pronounce misspelled words, just as they would in someone else’s work. I’ve taken this technique a step further, and often speak the words whilst I’m writing them to prevent typos in the first place (when I’m alone, of course!).

I would recommend taking three chapters of your work and testing each of these methods out to see what works for you. For me, a combination of all three is ideal, and I change between different techniques depending on the situation I’m in.