The Editing Mistake That Ruins Good Novels

Most new authors misunderstand what editing is for. They assume you edit to improve your prose.

And yes, editors do catch typos, flag awkward sentences, remove repetition, and suggest stronger word choices.

Yet those technical fixes are not the primary purpose of editing.

The real purpose of editing isn’t about the author at all. It’s to preserve the reader’s immersion.

Many beginning writers approach revisions like a contractor starting a home renovation project. They comb through the manuscript searching for imperfections. Soon, they find themselves rewriting pages that already work perfectly well. Sure, the paragraph and sentence-level mechanics tighten up, yet the story becomes weaker.

If you learn nothing else about editing, internalize this fact: The goal is not prose that is perfect.

The goal is prose that grabs the reader’s attention and holds it until the end.

Read the full post on Substack.

Debt Reckoning is now fully funded on Kickstarter. Stretch Goal 1 is funding now, so if you’d like to support the project and help make the book even better, you can check out the campaign here.