Editing Principle 14: Regaining Perspective Becomes Habit

It can be difficult to tell if what you’ve written is any good. You can ask friends to read your ______ , and tell you what they think. You can solicit a professional opinion. There are also ways to start training yourself to read your work as an editor — or a stranger — might. (Flannery O’Connor used to tell writing students that a writer must “judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity.”)

Here are four exceedingly simple ways to get out of your own head:

— Read your work out loud.

— Listen to someone else read it out loud. (This takes uncommon courage.)

— Change the font.

— Change venues, i.e. read it in a unusual (for you) place.

*Note on changing fonts. I find that switching to a looser font, say, from Times to Courier New, makes the baggy, windy parts of one’s prose stand out more, which helpfully highlights where and what to cut.