What I Learned the Hard Way: Wearing Many Hats

This question/blog topic request came from an IG follower! So thank you for that. As always, if there’s something you’ve been dying to ask me, you can ask me on IG, by email, or a comment on one of these posts.

This week I’m diving back into several freelance projects--I did my first reads a week or two ago on my Kindle--and now I’m inputting notes. The question was how I separate out my brain--freelance editor, writer, and reader. And this is such a good question.

They’re three different brains, and the hardest ones to separate are freelance editor and reader. I don’t think being a writer has made it harder to be a reader, but being an editor does make it harder. I’m always trying to figure out where an author’s going, what their intention is, what they’re setting up, and what promises are being fulfilled and what promises are being neglected, because that’s the kind of work that I do as a freelance editor. So I usually don’t read books for fun on the same days that I freelance edit. Sometimes this means that I go days without reading books because my schedule is full. That’s okay. It makes reading more interesting.

Being a freelance editor hasn’t affected my writing too much but being a writer has changed the way that I’m a freelance editor. I’ve been freelance editing since 2015, since my debut year, and just as my writing’s changed and improved, so has my editorial style. But as someone who is regularly edited, I know how it feels to get that edit letter, and I know how it feels for someone to get your book--and for someone to not get your book, or to want to cut something that you love in your book. 

I always like to share the advice I read on Neil Gaiman’s tumblr one time: if someone tells you there’s something wrong with your book, they’re probably right. If someone tells you how to fix it, they’re probably wrong.

That’s not always true--my editors and agent have frequently offered really excellent fixes for my books and I’m extraordinarily grateful for them--but I keep it in mind. I try to point out the feeling behind the ‘wrong’ thing now. It’s not that this scene needs to be cut just because, it’s because the pacing lags here and if we pull these two plot points together, we have a stronger, tighter sequence and that gives us room to play over here. This needs to happen not because I like tidy endings but because we’ve set this up as the essential promise to the reader and we have to fulfill that. 

I know that I like when my editors and agent explain the why behind things, and that I’m far more likely to follow their guidance when I understand what they’re trying to fix, so I want my clients to feel the same way. And the same way that when I understand the why behind the suggested fix allows me to troubleshoot potential other fixes, I want to leave room for my clients to suggest their own fixes. It’s also why I love doing Skype calls with clients to talk about the edits because I feel like even on the harsher edit letters I send, we end up in such a good space when we get to talk it out together and come up with some fixes.

Of these three hats--reader, freelance editor, writer--freelance editing takes the most from me. I can move by instinct when I’m writing and revising. By the time I sit down to write, I’ve typically spent a loooong time with my characters and my story in my head and there’s a level of familiarity that lets me do a lot of the work when I’m not at the keyboard so my typing time is pretty straightforward. (Laugh at me the next time I whine on Twitter.) 

But freelance editing takes the most brain power because I’m thinking about everything that came before the line I’m reading, everything that’s coming, and what I’m going to say about it and how this fits into the edit letter I’m already writing either on paper next to my computer or in my head. And that takes time and effort. I am trying to figure out how to deliver my notes on top of knowing what those notes are.

It’s made me feel much more for in-house editors who have to do this for authors, but are also thinking about how to position the book for sales and marketing and design and all of those other elements I don’t have to worry about!

On a more literal level, the way I separate out those different hats is that I rarely do them in the same day, or in the same time of day. This week, I’m both revising my YA and working on freelance manuscripts, so I’ll revise my YA in the morning and at lunch, and then freelance in the evenings. I can’t move from a client manuscript to my own book, or visa versa. My brain will stay too stuck in the last thing I was working on. 

I wear a lot of hats, and I don’t always wear them all well, and I certainly don’t juggle as well these days as I used to. But I really enjoy freelance editing. The extra income is great, but I also genuinely like working with clients. Eventually, and I keep saying it but it really is likely this year, I’ll have to step away from freelancing because I’ll just be too busy with my own books. And I’ll miss it a lot.