Feel the fear and do it anyway

Today I did some developmental editing work for a couple of clients, and my interactions with them over the last couple of days have reminded me what a terrifying thing it can be to share one's work, especially with a stranger. I know that all my writing--whether fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction--holds clues about my inner self, and that makes it risky to share.

An extreme example: I took a creative non-fiction writing class in the spring, and every week we had to turn in two pages that we'd written that week. Except we didn't just have to turn it in to the instructor; we had to read it aloud to 2-3 of our classmates. So terrifying! I was producing some really raw, vulnerable stuff, and it was hard enough to let someone else read it, much less read it aloud in front of people whom I didn't know well or at all.

How to be a published writer: Step 6a

Step 6a: Going the traditional route.

This is where this series of posts gets a little tricky. The next steps depend on whether you want to go the traditional route or want to self-publish, on what it is you want to publish (a short work vs. a book), and on whether you want to make money off your writing. In this post I'll focus on the traditional route for short works of fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction; in the next post (Step 6b) I'll focus on self-publishing.

But first, I'd like to clarify what I mean by "the traditional route." For my purposes, it means that someone who's in the business of making writers' work publicly available makes something I wrote publicly available. (And by "in the business," I do not necessarily mean "gets paid" to do so. Some very reputable journals are run by a staff of volunteers.) This may be a looser definition than yours: it includes getting published online as well as in print, and under this definition someone publishing a podcast online of you reading your work at an open mic counts.

When I recently decided to go the traditional route with some of my poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, I asked published writers and people in the publishing industry for advice--and thought back to my ex-boyfriend's process for getting his poetry published (he was published a lot)--and here's the process I've settled on:

How to be a published writer: Step 4

Step 4: Edit and proofread.

Only after I've completed one or two revisions and have judged a work "good enough" (because it will never be perfect) do I turn my attention to editing and proofreading.

As I wrote in "Every writer needs an editor," when it came time to edit and proofread my novella, I couldn't trust myself to do it. My head was so much in it that I stopped seeing what was on the page. I noticed as I tried to read it for the billionth time that I was skipping over whole sentences or even entire paragraphs. I needed an editor's help.

A quick note on terminology here, because there are at least three kinds of editing--developmental editing, line editing, and copy editing--and then there's proofreading too. "Oh my!" I hear you say. "What's the difference?"