My new iPad editing method has been a game changer

I keep promising to post more and then not doing it. There’s a reason for that. Everything I knew, I’ve already shared, and I learned that I didn’t know as much as I thought. Call it growth. Pair it with a lot of dramatic changes to my life, and very inconsistent motivation, and the frequent articles of 6 years ago have dried up completely.

But I am still writing, I am still learning, and I am still growing, and through this process I has struggled to find the time, the motivation, and the method for editing my work will keep me on track. I don’t have this trouble with other people’s work. In fact, I kinda love digging into the WIPs of other authors and pulling out the threads that will tie it altogether. But there’s a problem with that too, and it is that sitting and reading on a computer for hours on end is uncomfortable!

So, since I’ve been taking on more developmental editing jobs recently, I needed a more comfortable way to do it, and I finally sprung for a cheap refurbished iPad. I know, welcome to 2012, LC. I just never had a real need for one before. I set it up with my Microsoft account so I could share files between my computer and…

It changed everything. The piece I was moving through at a chapter a day on the laptop was suddenly flying through chapters to the end in just a week. And that that left me with unexpected time to move onto my own stuff…

I have editing three short stories that have sat for years. I’m doing a clean up of a finished manuscript that isn’t moving, and the most important thing is that it’s easy and fulfilling.

So here’s my method. Maybe you do something similar. Maybe it’s not new at all, but its new to me and it’s helped me so much during the winter when I tend to lose all my motivation to write and edit but feel the need to do it anyway and get down on myself for it.

I enable tracking on my computer and save it to One Drive. I open it from there onto the Word ap on my iPad. Then I select the read to me tool. The voice is very enthusiastic and no matter what the settings adjustments that won’t change, but she/he will read you your story while you follow along. You don’t have to have your iPad read to you but let me tell you how nice that lack of effort on your part is. It also is a highly recommended method for editing because you are hearing your mistakes and clunky sentences and typos rather than reading over them and missing them.

While you go through, when you come to something you need to fix you click on it. The reader will pause. Then, because typing is a PITA, you use the dictation button to correct it or make a comment. Then you press play and your reader starts up again.

Here is the key. Don’t try to fix things there. Just work like an editor. Point out the mistakes. make minor corrections. Comment on what would make it better, but don’t spend you time and limited energy trying to craft the perfect sentence or mess with with making sure your edits are perfectly punctuated, unless that is what you are correcting. Just get those red lines on there, with notes to correct. You’ll also be removed from your darlings on the writing level and able to see what needs to be cut out of the story on the whole.

When you are ready, you can open that file back up on your computer and just go through and accept changes and make the corrections. It takes so much less energy than reading through the whole thing and finding every mistake or bad sentence or plot issue and figuring out the correct fix there.

You don’t have to do it all at once. You can go back and forth. a few chapters of iPad notes, then get into your laptop and start correcting them. Right now, in of my manuscripts I am consistently 1-12 chapters ahead of my corrections because over the winter it was so much easier for me to sit on my couch and just let my iPad read me my story.

It is so much further than I have been on stories I’ve tried to push through, sitting at my desk on my computer, and I’m finding so many more nits to pick and lines to cut. My personal editing has improved significantly and so has my output.

This method is not for everyone. If you have a system that works, don’t mess with it. But if you’ve been struggling as I have, give it a try. It might be a game changer for you too.