Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
- Author
- Renni Browne & Dave King
- Year
- 1993
- Cluster
- craft & technique
- Format
- book
Two professional editors, one premise: publishing houses no longer line-edit the way they once did, so the writer must learn to do it — and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (1993) teaches exactly that, chapter by chapter. Show and tell (and when telling is right). Characterization and exposition. Point of view. Dialogue mechanics, beats, and speaker attributions. Interior monologue. Proportion — the quiet art of how much page-time a thing deserves. Each chapter ends with checklists and exercises, and the examples are before/after edits you can watch happen.
It is the most immediately applicable book on this shelf. You can read a chapter in the morning and fix that exact problem in your manuscript by afternoon, which no other entry here can honestly claim.
Two cautions. First, it is a revision tool: taken mid-first-draft it turns the inner editor up to a volume that stalls drafts. Second, its techniques compound into a clean, transparent commercial style — if your ambitions run against that grain, treat its rules as defaults to earn exceptions from, not laws.
You have a finished draft. Chapter for chapter, this is craft you can apply to today's manuscript page: show-and-tell, POV, beats, dialogue mechanics.
You're mid-first-draft — editing tools this sharp will stall you.
Scene & Structure — fix the scenes before you polish the lines · The Forest for the Trees — the editors' world these techniques come from