How to Deal With Being Edited

By Sean Brenner

Every writer needs a good editor. 

But even for writers who understand that, having your work edited can be an unpleasant experience. Sometimes it’s demoralizing to open a document to see what remains of your writing buried in a wall of markups and suggestions. Some writers find it difficult to deal with. Others even get indignant or confrontational about it, as if being edited is an attack on their skill or criticism of their work.

It’s not.

No matter how being edited might make you feel, it’s important to approach the process properly rather than letting those feelings warp your perspective. Editing isn’t about tearing your work down. It’s about refining and improving it. And it does that less effectively if you’re always fighting your editor. 

If you want the best results from editing, then you need to learn how to better deal with being edited. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to do that.

Swallow Your Pride

The first and most important step is to silence the part of your mind that gets indignant about being edited. Remember that neither the amount nor the extent of edits necessarily speaks to the quality of your writing; editing isn’t just for improving bad writing, but refining all writing, no matter how good it is. Any piece of writing, no matter the quality, will come away from a thorough edit with a pile of suggested changes. 

If you open your document and feel overwhelmed by all the suggestions, it might help to step away for a bit, calm yourself down, and come back to review the edit later. Whatever being edited makes you feel, it will get in the way of the reviewing process if you let it. Approach the edit as objectively as you can – be honest with yourself as you consider whether or not an edit improves your work, and don’t shoot down good ideas just because they aren’t your ideas. 

Reject Edits That Don’t Work*

Most of the time, edits are only suggestions. You can say no if you honestly believe the original wording is better. Just like writers, editors don’t always get things right, and when it comes to writing, there often is no right or wrong answer, only preference. It’s ultimately your piece, and if you and your editor disagree over a point of style or something similarly subjective, it’s fine to overrule them.

*Of course, this isn’t always an option. If you’re writing for your employer or a client, they often have the last word. Publishers may make accepting some or all of the edits part of the conditions for being published. In cases like that, you may have to just suck it up and accept your editor’s changes. If that’s the case, it’s usually best to simply let go of any bad feelings about it.

Editing is Necessary

It’s perfectly fine to not like having your work edited. Most writers don’t to some extent, and what you feel is what you feel. It’s what you do about it that matters. When it comes to editing, the best thing to do is swallow your pride, become objective, and remember that editing is a necessary process. It shapes your work into a better final product – and isn’t that what we want?