Editing your own manuscript is tough. It’s hard to spot weaknesses and omissions. If we recognized them, we wouldn’t have put them there in the first place, right?
In a post on the BookBaby blog, Michael Gallant says he used to bombard himself with questions during his revision process, about word choice, sentence flow, reader expectations, etc. etc. Today, he asks himself one question:
“Does it work?”
“In other words, I boil down my self-review process to a single, repeated, bare-bones, yes-or-no equation,” Gallant says. “Either something I wrote communicates powerfully and effectively or it doesn’t. Either my words create the movement, mood, and impact I need, or they don’t.”
This simple query takes a lot of pressure off the editing process. You don’t have to have the exact right answer to every question. You’ll have beta readers, critique partners, and possibly an editor to help you with those details. “Don’t worry about shooting for some imagined ideal,” Gallant writes. “If you feel your writing does the job from start to finish, chances are it’s going to be pretty outstanding in the end.”
Asking “does it work” also acknowledges that there are many paths to your creative destination. You might need to cut something or add a paragraph. Maybe a transition needs work or a description should be more precise. You might need to rewrite a whole page or simply insert a paragraph break. “Regardless of the specific fix, by reducing the situation to the simplicity of a single, simple question, I remove creative restraints and open a new basket of possibilities,” Gallant writes.
