It would be a rare writer that could alone craft an entire novel, free from mistakes and optimally tuned to give readers what they are looking for. Perhaps there are some very experienced authors who can produce a novel all on their own -- relying only on their own editing skills to bring the project to completion.
Clearly, I am not one of them.
I know I need editing and proofreading help, because when I do accept it, the editors find the same types of mistakes over and over again. And in alarming quantities.
But I don't like it.
Perhaps it is a matter of pride -- the better I think I am at the craft, the more resistant I become to editor's suggestions and improvements. It wasn't too difficult to accept with my first novel, but it is becoming harder and harder as time rolls along.
I notice I particularly dislike deletion. It sometimes feels like a limb being torn away from the manuscript. I hate losing that witty dialog, a clever turn of phrase, an interesting location.
I also dispise discovering spelling and other technical errors, and, alas, I make quite a few of them.
I do appreciate it when an editor takes a humorous passage, and makes it funnier, but still wonder why I couldn't come up with that myself.
Big picture errors, like timelines, plot illogic, characters doing things for seemingly out-of-character reasons -- yikes.
But I try to bear up under these critiques in the interest of producing a better product. So I swallow the pride, and somehow square up the feedback with my own image of self as an author, and generally make the changes.
But I can't help but wonder how other authors deal with the same thing.
