Be the judge of your own work

The risky business of editing yourself

At a literature event programmed and produced by a bunch of teenagers last week, I found myself talking to a 16 year old about the challenge of judging your own work.

“It’s really hard to know if what I’m writing is any good,” he lamented. “It’s basically impossible to know if anything is good until I put it in front of an audience.”

He’s got a point. This is why professional editors exist, after all. Books don’t end up on shelves until they’ve been read by several people, pulled apart, commented upon, red-penned, and put back together again. Even after going through that process, an author still may not know for sure how their work will be received.

We don’t all have the luxury of editors, especially in 2025 when literature and journalism are both experiencing major upheaval. Increasing numbers of writers are self-publishing, one way or another, including prominent authors and journalists who have abandoned the traditional publishing and broadcast worlds to set up independently.

I publish this newsletter twice a week, including new fiction, and don’t have the budget to employ an editor. While it’s almost impossible to know whether audiences will like something I’ve made, I do try my best to ensure a decently high level of quality. That requires me to be as self-critical as possible and rely on my instincts.

Human brains have advanced auto-correct features. I’m no scientist, but this is presumably the way brains are able to take the fragmented information about the world as provided by eyes, ears, nose and touch and turn it into something useful. Our eyes see the world upside-down, and often don’t tell the entire truth. The images captured through our lenses are under constant interpretation.

Mike Sowden

has covered optical illusions over on Everything Is Amazing:

The Science Of Seeing What Isn't There

A Room With An Impossible View (Redux)

On that second article, don’t miss the Ames window video:

Point is, our brains are always filling in the gaps and helping us out. This is really useful for surviving the day and navigating the world.

But it’s really bad for writers.

We know what we intended to write. Whether you’re writing freehand or via a keyboard, we know precisely which words we meant to use, and how to spell them. Even if we’ve got it wrong on the page, or hit the wrong keys in a few places, it’s OK — our brains will usefully auto-correct the mistakes and present us with the perfect, idealised version of our creation. The version we thought we made.

As a result, it’s bizarrely difficult to spot typos in your own work.

Read someone’s else writing, and typos will jump out. They will seem to be written in a different font and double-sized, given how obvious they are. Mistakes jump up and down waving frantically for your attention, but only when you read someone else’s work.

And, of course, that applies when other people read your work.

This makes it very difficult to edit and assess our own writing, which is what we actually want to do. Your brain is lying to you, presenting a false picture of what is really there on the page. If only we could temporarily disable some of the auto-corrections.

In a professional capacity, this has been easier for me. When writing copy at work, there’s usually a range of people who will read through the words before they go public. Most organisations have some sort of proofing built in.¹

Writing my fiction or this newsletter doesn’t have such luxuries. I’ve had to learn to produce decent copy often without the benefits of an editor or proofer. Having to write fast and accurate copy in the day job, especially in my early career, certainly helped train those muscles.

There are simple techniques that can help:

Use a spellcheck. This is an obvious one, but it’s surprising how often mis-spellings show up in articles and newsletters online. Grammatical errors are one thing, being harder to spot, but typos or incorrect spelling is really easy to catch.

Personally, I don’t use Grammarly or similar tools. I know a lot of people swear by them, but I’m uncomfortable with an automated system weighing in on the actual structure of my work. I would rather my writing be grammatically a bit off, but be uniquely mine, than use a tool to sand down all the edges so that I sound like Generic Professional Copy. Absolutely use the tools which help you, but do be cautious to retain what makes your writing yours.

In the age of AI, there are two options, really: you sound like you, or you sound like everything else. AI is the great homogeniser, and to stand out from the grey goop requires being quirkier and more idiosyncratic.

Moving the text to a different form is a great way to improve its quality. If you’ve typed the words on a computer, try printing it out, or reading on a tablet or a phone. Anything that shifts it into a different format, a different shape. This seems to break the brain’s auto-correct, and makes errors much easier to spot.

Perhaps the most useful version of ‘move to a different form’ is reading aloud. One of the earliest tips I learned was that reading your work aloud was a good way to assess it, but this advice was usually linked to dialogue. If words are supposed to be spoken, whether in an actual script or simply within prose, reading out loud can reveal odd patterns that make it sound unrealistic or awkward. The advice applies to any text, though.

Around the start of 2024 I started recording audio voiceovers for this newsletter, and I’m pretty sure it resulted in a general increase in writing quality and technical precision. The idea behind recording voiceovers was for accessibility and convenience, but it’s developed into a vital part of my post-production. It’s the final editing pass before I hit publish. I’m often editing and rewriting sections during the audio recording. In my fiction, it’s often when I spot continuity errors or plot holes.

It helps that recording is so easy and affordable. I wrote more about it here:

Most of what I’ve talked about relates to technical quality, rather than artistic quality. Which is fine — technical polish is easier to achieve and comes first, in a way. Sorting that stuff out clears the decks so that we can then focus in on the more exciting job of crafting something with intent.

This is where we stray from my area of expertise. There are many more qualified tutors than me for how to become a better writer. But I will share one tip, which is the useful sentences check.

Especially in fiction, I try to make sure that every sentence is contributing something. Every sentence should be doing at least one thing: revealing something about a character, moving the plot forward, exploring the core themes of the story, creating atmosphere, and so on. If a sentence can do more than one of those things, all the better. It sounds obvious, but it’s very easy to fill a manuscript with waffle without realising.

In non-fiction this tends to manifest itself in pointless opening paragraphs. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve simply deleted the first paragraph of an essay. First paragraphs are often inadvertent warm-ups, when we are finding our way in to the subject being discussed. Often the second or third paragraph of a first draft is the better opening.

To get back to the student’s observation from the start:

“It’s basically impossible to know if anything is good until I put it in front of an audience.”

In some ways this will always be true, especially in figuring out what’s going to resonate with people. I’ve written articles and stories which I think are going to be huge, only to see them fade into obscurity. It’s the essays I cobbled together last-minute and in a hurry that are the ones that often do better. It’s hard to predict.

That said, when we’re four years old we think everything we do is amazing. We draw a stick man and think it’s the best art has to offer. And, intriguingly, it’s not obvious to us how our efforts differ from, say, the Mona Lisa. As we get older we begin to recognise that gap, and become more critical of our own work.

You see this awareness failing at times. When you used to see tone deaf people in the X-Factor auditions, clearly unable to sing but convinced of their own brilliance: that’s an example of not recognising the reality of their current skillset.²

Being self-aware as an artist is about recognising where we are and where we’d like to be. Identifying the distance between the two is what motivates us, and also points the way forward. That self-critical eye can be trained over time: the 4 year old has no ability to assess their own work. A 14 year old has read more books, watched more movies, heard more music, and is therefore better positioned to identify what makes something good — even without formal training, any artist with a naturally critical eye will be picking up on the fundamentals. The more experience we get, the easier it becomes. This is where the debate from last week becomes relevant: reading a lot makes it easier to anchor ourselves as writers. Watching a lot of films will help a new filmmaker understand the language of cinema.

Gaining experience makes it easier to spot that gap between reality and ambition. Studying an art form at school or university or online can sharpen our critical skills. The gap will always be there, and that’s fine. After all, if it wasn’t, it would mean either a lack of ambition or an over-estimation of our skills. And that would be the real tragedy.

One day, maybe I’ll be able to hire an editor and stop worrying about all this.

But not today.

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1. That said, it is harder with the more immediate nature of 21st century comms. The demands for more content inevitably make quality control harder.

2. It’s also an example of unhelpful friends and family: surrounding yourself only with sycophants doesn’t help, no matter how well-meaning.