Writing and Editing Skills: How do you hyphenate your career?
How can someone effectively combine writing and editing skills? By establishing what I call a “hyphenated career,” precisely that of a Writer-Editor!
Combine Writing and Editing Skills – Become a Writer-Editor
In my book The Business of Storytelling, I talk about how to create a writer-editor career, where you use what you learn as a writer to reinforce the editing side of your career and vice versa.
For those of us who enjoy taking on a variety of projects in our work, a hyphenated career can be a source of fulfillment and growth (both personal and career-related). I’ve always said I’m a better editor because I’m a writer, and I’m a better writer because I’m an editor.
The other day, a reader contacted me and said she was a different kind of hyphen: a bookseller-writer. I loved that! Her deep understanding of what readers enjoy reading makes her a better writer, and her understanding of writing and literature makes her a better bookseller.
A friend of mine is a great beta reader/big-picture editor because she’s also a visual artist (“Even painters info-dump,” she says.) I love the idea of there being all kinds of hyphenated careers possible for writers and editors.
If you’re considering extending your editing (or your writing) career in a new direction, you might enjoy exploring book doctoring and ghostwriting, and I have just the class for that starting October 7: Editorial Toolkit: Book Doctoring and Ghostwriting!
Tips for Editors & Writers
World-building without info-dumping
World-building is often seen as the province of science fiction and fantasy writers who have to convey new-to-us settings and cultures, and occasionally by historical writers who have to convey the feel of an era that a reader may not know much about. But every story takes place somewhere. Even stories set in a contemporary…
Focus on a limited number of problems in story development
Typically in a manuscript evaluation or developmental edit, I focus on what I perceive to be the three-to-five most important concerns I’ve noticed in the ms. This is the approach I teach my editing students. Editing too many problems at once overburdens the author In any given ms, there may be ten or fifteen developmental problems…
Clients who want services you don’t offer
Newer freelancers sometimes come to me in a panic because a client has approached them to do work that’s outside their typical scope. Commonly this is something like the freelancer offers copyediting and developmental editing but the client wants coaching. What should they do? They don’t know how to coach, they don’t offer coaching services,…
