Editing and Short Fiction

Should I bother hiring an editor to look over my short fiction, or is it a waste of time?

While it’s often dismissed as not being worth the effort, there are a lot of advantages to hiring an editor for short fiction.

1. It’s short! That means it’ll be considerably less expensive than hiring an editor on a novel. It’s a great chance to try out an editor, see how well you work together, and see what issues they can identify constructively in your writing.

2. The short fiction market is competitive. It’s every bit as competitive as the novel-length fiction market, if not moreso. Therefore, your story should be as polished and perfect as possible before you send it off to compete with other stories for attention.

3. In short fiction, every word counts! This is true in a novel, too, but in novels you have a bit more leeway. In short fiction you’re limited to just a few thousand words to draw the reader in and give them a setting, rounded characters, and a plot from beginning to end.

4. Writers often zip short fiction out more quickly, do fewer rewrites, and generally spend less time looking at it. That makes it even more important to have an extra set of eyes checking on all the details.

5. Short fiction will take an editor less time, so you’ll likely be able to get very quick turnaround. I’ve snuck in a short story edit for a writer during our lunch break at a convention, so that she could make the changes and show it to an interested market the next day. I can’t promise THAT kind of service, but it will certainly be a shorter time frame (less waiting, less time to foster your red-ink anxiety!) than for a novel.

6. All the tips, hints, and corrections you receive on your short story can also be applied to the rest of your writing. You may learn something about where your weaknesses are as a writer, which words you misspell or overuse, learn “rules” you never knew about a grammatical device or punctuation mark, or style conventions in published fiction. These and plenty other personalized observations that will make your writing — all your writing — stronger.

Tagged as: editing, short fiction, writing