01 Premium Episode: Our Philosophy on Editing

Editing to Help Readers Disappear Into Your Story

Beth Barany introduces the premium Edit the Future Science Fiction and Fantasy Revision Lab and shares her and her husband Ezra’s philosophy for editing novels: revise rough drafts so readers can “disappear into” the story.

She advises writers to notice what bumps them out of the narrative (boredom, confusion, awkwardness in plot, character, or mechanics) during early read-throughs, expect multiple editing passes, and seek feedback as part of a normal process.

Beth addresses perfectionism—urging writers to finish the first draft before trying to perfect it—and emphasizes reaching for excellence with compassion rather than harsh self-talk.

She frames writing as rewriting, warns against comparing progress to others, encourages focusing on the next immediate unit of work, and defines “better” as an improved reading experience.

She points listeners to an Edit Your Novel Checklist and previews a deeper overview next week.

00:00 Welcome to Premium Lab 

00:19 Editing Philosophy Overview 

00:49 Spot Story Bumps 

01:49 Multiple Passes and Feedback 

02:27 Perfectionism with Compassion 

04:04 Rewriting Is Writing 

04:37 Stop Comparing Yourself 

05:33 Trust Your Creative Flow 

06:12 What Better Means 

07:09 Wrap Up and Next Steps

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CREDITS

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MUSIC: Uppbeat.io
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Transcript

BETH BARANY 0:00

Hello, and welcome to our premium episodes for Edit the Future Science Fiction and Fantasy Revision Lab. I am your host and teacher Beth Barany, an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer. Creativity coach, keynote speaker, and podcaster. I'm very excited to bring this premium channel to you. In this first episode, I wanna share with you. My philosophy around editing, and also I'm gonna include, I'm gonna say our philosophy around editing because this also includes my husband who, Ezra Bani, who is a thriller writer and also a writing teacher, and helps me in my writing business and has a similar perspective, and together we have created this material, this curriculum around editing your novel. let's begin. my premise is that we write novels to inspire the world. we are writing stories that our readers can disappear into. So that's our, our main job when we edit, is to take our rough draft, our manuscript, and create something that our readers will just disappear into? Disappear into the story. So when we edit, our job is to notice from our own perspective what bumps us out of the story. That's my first indicator for myself and what, when I edit other people's work, that there is something awkward going on in the story. It could be about the plot, the characters, the grammar, punctuation. It could be all kinds of things. The first thing is to start to notice when you edit your own work is what? Distracts you from the writing. What makes you turn away notice when you're like, Ugh, I'm bored, or I'm confused. and just note that, especially in the first read through. Also know that most writers that I know, actually all the writers that I know, do multiple passes on their work. That is totally normal. It's not one and done. It's gonna be many, many passes and what those passes look like for you. if you've never edited a manuscript before, you may not know what order you wanna do things in. Or if you have edited books before, they may be a preferred order, but some things might be sticky. Just know that both Ezra and I do multiple passes on our work, and also all the novelists that I know get feedback on their work during the editing process. Perfectly normal. Another issue or concern that I see pops up in a lot of writers is perfectionism. I have writers who come to me with a manuscript that is not even finished yet and want it to be better. And I was like, you can't make it be better. You haven't even finished the first draft. So if you're listening to this and you haven't finished the first draft, do that first and then start on the editing process and notice that perfectionism, it is a tool, it's actually a skillset that will allow you to notice what isn't working, but it's not a definition of who you are, it's just, a bar that you have set a high bar, which is awesome. Also know that if you don't know how to edit the story, that's totally fine. You're learning. We're all in that process. There's always these stages of learning for editing. My stance is that you can reach for excellent writing without being hard on yourself. So without using words or tones or attitudes that you would never say to a dear friend. So as you go through this process of editing your novel, have compassion. Your perfectionism is gonna serve you and make your manuscript better, but you don't have to grind down on yourself, be harsh on yourself about that process because let's face it, not sugarcoating it, editing our work is hard. No need to punish yourself for what you don't know. You know what you know and what you don't know you're gonna learn. And my underlying philosophy around this is that you are doing the best that you can at any given moment, given the resources that you have available to you in that moment. So if you wanna get better at editing, then you need more resources and that's why you're here, which is awesome. Another premise around editing is that What we think of as writing is often rewriting. The books we see on the shelves they have been rewritten many, many times. All the published authors I've ever heard of, they go through a lot of rewrites. Rewriting is actually writing. We're editing, we're fixing, we're tweaking, we're revising, revision. It's all part of the writing process. So I encourage you to trust yourself, trust your instincts, and be really, really gentle with yourself during this process because it is hard. It is still hard for me. Boom. Hands down. Also, I notice another trap that people fall into is they compare themselves to others. It's so easy to do that, right? and in today's day and age with social media and everything, there's a lot of comparison. It seems like way more than ever. So notice that you are working at your own pace, so really respect your needs. There's no need to compare yourself with other people. Others, we don't know where they came from. We don't know where they started. there's so much we don't know. So it's really apples and oranges. How can you compare yourself to anybody else's progress? So what I do when I'm faced with noticing that I'm telling myself, ah, I should be further along than I am when it comes to editing, is I say, well, my job right now is to focus on what's right in front of me. This moment, this scene, this paragraph, or even this sentence. I have to scope it down so that I can focus and just address what needs to be addressed right in the moment. I believe that we are all creative and your creativity brought you this far. It brought you to write a first draft. Oh my God, that is so incredible. And you trusted yourself enough to get here. You had a vision, you had a feeling, you had sense. You had, a desire, you had a dream. You had stories in your head. You had characters talking to you. That's amazing. You trusted your creative flow enough to get here. So my premise is that. The trust that you put in yourself to write the first draft. Now we get to deepen into that trust and really pay attention to your creative flow as you work on the editing process. Something that writers come to me with is like, I wanna make a change, or I've made this change, but I'm not sure if it's better. Yeah, it can be very hard to evaluate if the changes we've made on our manuscript make it better. Now, better, what does better mean? Right? What? What is the criteria for better? My criteria for better is a better reading experience. It allows the reader to really engage with the story and disappear themself into the story. If you're not sure, you can have multiple versions side by side. And when I have taken the manuscript as far as I can, this is where I start asking for feedback. It's really important to start getting feedback as soon as you're comfortable, and we'll be talking about that later, in this premium channel. Overall, I want to say please trust yourself and know that the part of you that birthed the story that brought you to this point, you can continue to trust your creative flow and allow that to guide you as you edit. All right. That's it for this week. Be sure to check out the Edit Your Novel Checklist if you don't already have it. I'll be putting the link in the show notes. And it will, really guide you as you go through things. Next week I will be going in depth, and doing an overview of the Edit Your Novel Checklist. Write long and prosper.