Be Your Own Best Editor and Set the Writer in You Free (BYEO Workshops Intro)

Wherever you are, this is how you enter the joyful, freeing practice of being your own best editor.

Be Your Own Editor workshops

Wanna set the writer in you free to create audaciously? Learn to trust your editorial skills. Distinguish between editor you and writer you. Apply the tools of a professional editor to your own work. And bring your writing to the next level. Nothing has been better for my writing than applying to it the perspective and strategies I’ve learned over two decades editing others’ work and mini publications. Geeking out on ways to systemize, see the big picture, and easily apply editorial tools is my jam. I can’t wait to share them in workshops I’m calling Be Your Own Editor.

Who is BYOE for?

Do you have a draft, or a few, you’d like to take further but you’re feeling stuck? Do you have stories you’d like to tell, things you want to say but don’t quite know how to be a “writer”? Or are you a seasoned writer who loves the writing process but kinda dreads the editing or at least would like to have an intentional, structured way you approach revising your own work and can return to again and again? A writer who’d love to spruce up or add to your system of revising so you can see your work with fresh eyes and let it sprout wings and fly in new directions? These workshops are made for you!

When are they?

Live Zooms, Feb–Apr, second and fourth Saturdays. Or whenever works for you. Replay available! Attend one or all. Each workshop stands on its own.

What we’ll do:  

• Apply step-by-step exercises to works in progress to distill them into their best versions

• Practice separating writer from editor so we can see our writing through fresh eyes

• Learn when to apply different editing stages/toolboxes to help us create audaciously and mold masterfully

• Dig deeper into each editing toolbox to transform our work

• Look at examples of how the tools work and learn to wield them that fits our own unique practice 

• Learn from critically acclaimed writers and experts

• Meet other writers to learn from and become fans of each other’s work and progress

🗓🔥 You’ll need a paid subscription for the full dive. An annual subscription gets you access to all workshop replays already posted and all live workshops hosted in the next 12 months, plus all replays and corresponding course materials and exercises. With five in the spring and five more in fall, that’s less than $5/workshop. And the preview below will get you started.

💫🗓 Schedule

Spring workshops

• Reach New Writing Heights. Developmental Editing 1, Strategic Outlining (replay available now)

• Reel in New Writing Depths. Developmental Editing 2, Deep Questioning, Zoom - Feb 24 (link - Feb 21)

• Be Stunningly Concise. Content Editing 1, the Art of the Cut, Zoom - Mar 9 (link - Mar 6)

• Wow with Your Choices. Content Editing 2, Hello Verbs, Farewell Clichés, Mar 23 (link - Mar 20)

• Hot for the Press. Line Editing, Polish, Baby, Polish, Zoom - Apr 13 (link - Apr 10)

Plus five more in the fall.

What qualifies me to offer BYOE workshops

Over nineteen years, I’ve edited more than a thousand manuscripts, from memoir to fiction to self-help and lots in between. Whether as a developmental, content, or line editor or a co/ghost writer, I’ve seen my job as helping authors transform works they’ve knitted from the fibers of their beings into the best versions possible. Before that, I was briefly an award-winning journalist. I’ve written for clients ranging from question-answering systems to influencers to nonprofits. I’ve overseen mini zines and small publications as managing/assigning editor.

In a writing class last year (with author Tamara Dean, whose classes I highly recommend), I commented that approaching my writing as if it was that of a client has infused my practice with joy and freedom and broadened my craft. The question, “How do you do that?” led to these workshops. I pondered. What were the tools I turned on my own work? How did I gain the trust of my inner writer and editor? And what was so joyful and liberating about doing so?

How honing your editing skills can liberate your writing

A writer, says Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, slides desk and chair “out in the middle of the air … [to] float thirty feet from the ground.” Warblers hiss, and you look out between crowns of maple trees while birds fly below your chair.  “Your work,” she says, “is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk midair.”

She also tells the story of a woman stranded in a remote locale with her young daughter. Seeing fish in a nearby lake, the woman fashioned line and hook. But what to use as bait? She cut a small chunk of her flesh to catch the first fish and, thus, kept herself and her daughter alive for the season until they could hike out. So, too, Dillard notes, our personal writing must start with a chunk of our essence.

Pouring through years of marked-up manuscripts and correspondences, I saw what fueled my career as an editor. Beyond my love of language, I have honored what Dillard captured—the feat of imagination and sacrifice that is creating worlds, external and internal, on a blank page. “You are such a patient, generous editor,” commented one publisher. “Thank you,” wrote an author. “You knew exactly what I meant to say and how to bring it out.” I knew the authors I worked with were baiting material with a chunk of their being. I knew they had to believe over and over in their ability to soar. I saw it as my job to assist so that what they’d thus created could shine. 

The writer in me (maybe this is akin to the inner child in therapy speak) learning to trust that patient, generous editor (the witness and guide) to honor her process and polish her work is the best thing that’s happened to my writing. I believe this can be true for all of us. If we know we have the perspective and skill to see our initial renderings from fresh eyes, from readers’ eyes; to catch not only mistakes but also misunderstandings; to coax out deeper, fuller truths, we can set the writers in us free to be audacious and wild and experimental. If we know we’ll have our own backs during the revision process, we can let go, knowing our sacrifice and belief in ourselves will pay off.

A note on writing and editing and who does it

Anyone who writes or thinks about writing, wherever you are in your process, can benefit from tweaking the process of writing and revising and learning to use strategies that have worked for others. Writers are artists whose paints and brushes are words and phrases. Wielding them with intentionality will no doubt make the practice of your art both more joyful and more fruitful!

On personal writing, author and teacher Mary Karr says, “Partly what murders me about memoir—what I adore—is its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybody-who’s-lived-can-write-one aspect” (Art of Memoir). I believe that applies to any type of writing, as well as to revising that work. Writing and editing are skills you can get better at with practice.

And as editor

Amanda B. Hinton

of The Editing Spectrum points out in “Holding Back Tears in the New York Public Library,” everyone edits their own work—even George Washington and Maya Angelou.¹ So, wherever you are, from someone who’s lived and jots notes about it to an established author, I’d love to share with you what I’ve found to be the joyful, liberating practice of being your own best editor.

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👐 And if you know someone who would dig these workshops, please share. Forward the email, share this post on social media, or restack it on Substack. Thank you!

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All artwork for the Rolling Desk is by the crazy talented Alexandra Rickards. Check out her art and think of her for your project needs!

1. I’ve seen stuff Amanda has worked on. And it’s a reminder that working with an outside editor is a whole other wonderful journey. Imagine being your own best editor and then taking your work to a professional editor—oh the heights you could reach!