Don't just be yourself

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

If Robert Burns' suggestion came true, there's a danger that we'd all jump off a cliff and there wouldn't be anyone left in the world.

But what if it were our writing that we could view through another's eyes? Some of us might be horrified and some pleasantly surprised, but either way we'd have a revolutionary editing tool.

A famous writer (who might have been Bernard Cornwell or Stephen King, but I can't remember and might possibly have imagined reading this somewhere) tells of a discovery he made while faced with the despair of reading over his own work. He took a favourite book by an author he admired, and typed out a few pages on his own typewriter. Transformed into something that physically looked just like his own writing, he realised that he judged it more harshly than he did when it looked like a 'proper' book.

This tactic can work the other way round too – when approaching the home straight of editing, I want to gain emotional distance from my work, and be as tough – or, indeed, as lenient – as I would be if it were written by someone else. I've tried the following ploys to gain that distance, and it's surprising how well a simple practical change can show up the clunky bits.

1. Reading it aloud – all right, all right, I know it's a crappy cliché of interweb writing advice, but it really is useful for finding out whether dialogue sounds like something a real live person would say. Reading aloud is easier said than done – it can be a bit of an eye-opener as to how little privacy is ever available – but if I get the opportunity, I don't just read aloud but record it too. The microphone becomes an 'audience' that means I have to persevere through the cringeworthy bits rather than keep breaking off to groan, weep etc.

2. Listening to the recording after a few days and pretending it's a proper audiobook. Humiliating and illuminating in the same go.

3. Changing the font, preferably to something you’d find in a published book, but you could use Comic Sans or Papyrus if you want to make the whole experience even more disheartening.

4. Changing the background colour of the page – I'm told this is good for reducing glare while writing too.

5. Changing the page setup to A5 and printing two pages to one sheet so it's closer to the size and layout of a published book.

6. Converting the file to PDF. This is such a simple change and yet I find it has a great distancing effect.

7. Printing it off on Lulu – I’d want to be sure the book was pretty much ready to go before shelling out for this, but seeing a story in book form can expose whether it could really compete with whatever's next to it in Waterstones. (I tend to get shelved next to Ayn Rand... thanks a bunch, alphabet.)

Do you try to see your work as others might see it? What are your practical tips?



(UPDATE: Sorry this post disappeared for a few days - a combination of Blogger problems and me not having web access to fix it. Thank you very much to those who had left comments - unfortunately I haven't been able to retrieve them.)