Agent in Your Pocket: Are You Editing Yourself or Editing Your Book?
Literary Agent Jessica Berg offers advice for recognizing when you’re improving your manuscript and when you’re making changes out of fear.
Are You Editing Yourself or Editing Your Book?
Before we can decide that we need to sort out some definitions.
When you’re editing the book, you’re doing so in service of the manuscript. That means you’re doing your best to make the prose work well on the page.
On the other hand, editing yourself means that you’re revising out of fear or self-doubt. You’re worried that your choices (which make the books yours) are going to make it stick out for the wrong reasons.
One is a craft judgment and the other is preemptive self-censorship.
So why are they so difficult to tell them apart? Well, on the surface, they both look like revision. Both involve staring at sentences for far too long. Cutting, reworking. Changing words, removing commas. The difference here isn’t in the action, but in the intention.
The tells that you’re editing yourself often look like this:
- Hedging when you know your imagery was exquisite but you consider removing it because it’s too ‘weird’
- Cutting the details you love because ‘no one writes like that’
- Softening characters so they remain likeable, even though their unlikability is what you love about them
Let’s pause on that last one for just a moment because I see writers do it far too often. You write unlikable characters who are messy and terrible and imperfect. But after rounds of beta reader feedback and revisions, somehow the character has become soft. The scenes are still moving and the arc is trending the way it needs to but the spark of that character has gone missing. As an agent, that weirdness is often what I’m on the lookout for, so when the characters are sanded down, I’m likely moving onto the next manuscript in my pile.
The thing is, these are all concrete and specific choices you’re making about the narrative. But in doing so, you’re making the work less yours and more like everything else. Especially if you’re trying to break into the trad pub space, the urge to ensure your work sounds like what’s on the shelf makes sense. After all, you want to increase your chances of getting the book out into the world. The problem is that when you do that, your manuscript risks becoming forgettable. Worse, it risks losing its identity, which brings us back to the original question.
Are you editing yourself or are you editing the book?
So when you feel this urge to thin the edges, ask yourself if it’s truly needed. Do you want to make the character more likeable because you’re worried your readers won’t connect? Or do you want to make the character more likeable to increase the chances of publication? One is a craft choice and the other is a choice operating from the place of fear.
Here’s a fix.
First, do a story pass and ask yourself all of the big structural questions about scene and stakes and conflict. During this pass, you’re not allowed to alter your voice or the choices your characters are making.
Then, do a line pass. This is where the sentence level work happens. If you find yourself cutting something and the reason is because someone else might not like it, you have to put it back on the page.
These passes are going to force you to ask different questions of the work. One will protect the story and the other protects you.
*Join Rosecliff Literary Founder & Agent Jessica Berg and WD Editor-in-Chief Amy Jones in April 2027 for a weeklong writing retreat in the heart of Tuscany.
