Editing for a Living Changes How You Read Everything
Once upon a time, I used to read for pleasure.
Now I read like a bomb disposal specialist.
Not the relaxing kind — the kind who edges toward Chapter One thinking, Please, please don’t blow up into a sentence that makes me twitch. Because editing, like glitter and second marriages, is forever. Once your brain learns to scan for passive voice, filter words, wobbly structure, and the dreaded “wandering eyes” (“She rolled her eyes at him…” And what? He picked them up and rolled them back at her?), you don’t get to turn that off.
And the truth is:
Editing professionally changes how you process story.
I don’t just turn pages — I teardown pages.
I spot the adverb like a hawk spotting a field mouse.
I sense head-hopping the way dogs sense earthquakes.
I can smell a plot hole through drywall.
Sometimes it’s delightful — when a book is clean, tight, well-crafted? My editor brain stretches out like a cat in a sunbeam. I relax. I trust. I fall in. That’s magic.
But then there are books where every paragraph feels like I’m silently line-editing in my head:
We could cut that.
Why is this scene here?
You used “just” three times in two sentences.
No one “smirks a line of dialogue.”
It’s a blessing and a curse.
Editing has made me a better writer, a sharper reader, and occasionally a menace to enjoy books around. (Tracy has learned to ignore the soft groan I make when I encounter an unnecessary “that.”)
But here’s the secret upside no one tells you:
When a story is good enough to silence the editor brain?
You know you’ve found something special.
And that moment — the one where craft disappears, and it’s just you and the world on the page — is worth crawling through a hundred head-hopping scenes to find.
So yes, editing changes how you read everything.
But would I trade it?
Not a chance.
Question for the comments:
If you read or edit professionally — what’s the one writing tic that pulls you out of a story every time?
(Asking for… well, all of us.)
— Mark