Self Editing, and what you need to know before hiring a Pro

You’ve typed the last sentence. Your manuscript is finally finished. Maybe messy, maybe radiant, maybe stitched together with midnight panic and early-morning hope—but it exists.

And now, you’re thinking it’s time to hand it to a professional editor.

My best advice for this very moment is… Pause.

Not because your book isn’t worth it (it so is). But because the way you hand it over determines the quality—and cost—of the editing you receive. As an editor of best selling books, I can’t stress this enough. The clearer your draft, the deeper your editor can go. The more truthfully you’ve stripped your fluff, caught the passive sludge, and rooted your verbs in clarity and confidence, the more powerful the edit becomes.

This isn’t about doing our job, but I can wholeheartedly say that the more time and energy you pour into your manuscript, the clearer your voice, your message, and the final product… which of course is what you’re trying to achieve.

Sidenote - if you have a scrappy draft and you know you need help, you can decide to hire a developmental editor at this point and go through the process of refining the entire thing together before sending it off to a line editor. But if you know your topic well, and you know how you want to present it, read on.

Because the self-editing phase is so often overlooked and way underrated!

1. Get Real About the Fluff

Your book is not a place for filler words, self-apologies, or padded paragraphs that spiral into oblivion. Cut anything that weakens your energy.

If a sentence can be said in five words instead of fifteen, do it. If a paragraph re-explains something you nailed three pages ago, trust your reader’s intelligence and let it go. If you catch yourself writing to sound “smart,” strip it back until it sounds like you—honest, embodied, necessary.

Ask yourself:

• Does this sentence move the story or message forward?

• Is this repetition comfort or avoidance?

• Am I narrating out of fear that I haven’t said enough?

Cut with love. Edit like you respect your reader's time and nervous system.

2. Check Your Voice—Passive vs Active

Your reader isn’t here to be lulled to sleep, they’re here to be led, jolted, invited. Passive voice waters you down. It’s the difference between:

The decision was made to leave the job.

vs

I chose to walk away.

Your book needs verbs with a backbone. Active voice invites clarity. It’s not just grammatical—it’s energetic. It shows your reader that you are in the driver’s seat of your story, even when it’s painful, even when it’s uncertain.

You don’t need to be a grammar nerd to catch it—read your work out loud. Listen for where the power drops. That’s where the passivity lives.

3. Time Travel Through Your Tenses

You have a powerful story to share, and some of it involves the present. I get it, because it’s the most common thing I see in the manuscripts I edit. Yet if your past and present are shape-shifting mid-paragraph, it gets pretty confusing for your reader—and leaks your authority. Choose a tense and stick with it unless the shift is deliberate and serves the story (you’ve gotta know the rules to know when it’s perfectly ok to break them!).

Ask yourself:

• Is this section meant to be in the past, or am I subconsciously jumping into now?

• Do my verb tenses help the reader feel the moment or lose track of it?

Consistency builds trust. It doesn’t mean rigidity—but it does mean discernment.

4. Name the Cringe (and Rewrite It Anyway)

If there’s a line you secretly hate but left in because maybe it sounds good to others, cut it. That’s your intuition speaking. Rewrite until it feels like you—no borrowed phrases, no faux-poetic attempts to impress.

You don’t need to perform brilliance, you just need to speak it in your voice.

5. Know Why This Phase Matters

Editors are not here to guess your intention, even though some of us are quite gifted at this (if you have clients you adore you’ll totally relate, because you just get them). Editors are generally not here to dig through layers of unresolved thought patterns or clean up all your energetic debris (wait, what?) I mean we can, again depending on the type of editing you’re paying for, but it takes far longer than it might otherwise. Our job is to elevate what’s already working. To tighten, not to translate.

When you do the sacred, messy, necessary act of self-editing:

• You claim your voice.

• You protect your truth from being diluted.

• You make space for the editor to offer precision, not go off on the wrong tangent.

A professional edit on a half-baked draft is a very expensive lesson in self-abandonment.

FINALLY, Read It Like It’s Already a Book

Print it. Read it in a different room. Out loud. On your couch. In the bath. Anywhere you don’t write.

Feel it in your body. I know it can be tough when you’ve read a paragraph so many times you don’t even know if makes sense anymore, and honestly when you reach that point we can definitely ground you back into the marrow of your manuscript.

Otherwise, when you’re reading take note:

• Where does your energy rise?

• Where do you drift off?

• Where do you feel the ache of something true… or the uncomfortable ick of something fake?

Edit from there.

You don’t have to be an editor to be a sovereign storyteller, your desire to write is proof you already are. You just have to listen harder. Cut deeper. And trust yourself enough to clean your house before guests arrive… and no I don’t mean frantically shoving your mess into the nearest drawer... I mean clearing the clutter with reverence; tending to your pages with presence, like your bestie was coming over to relax into them, because she is.

And because your words, and the message they carry, deserve nothing less.