I write for a small newspaper in Harrisonburg, Va. Except that is about to change. On Feb. 23, I will leave this job to go work at an equally small newspaper in Morgantown, W.Va. Except at this paper, I will become a copy editor/layout editor. In this capacity, I will cease to be a writer and instead work on honing the writing of other people.
I have also written four novels — the most recent of which I have completed in November. None of these are published yet. But now that I have four novels under my belt, I am going back through all four and giving THEM some serious copy-editing. Actually, by this stage it's more like minor tweaking, since all four of them have already gone through the serious copy-editing. Now all that's left is some final polishing.
Once all four are polished, I will shop them around. In fact, I made several New Year's resolutions, and one of them was to complete the copy-editing and start shopping them around.
Anyone who has ever written for a living will tell you that there is no great writing, only great RE-writing. I completed my first novel in August, 1999, and when I did I thought I was really hot. But now when I look at what I had done back then and I'm embarrassed. That one was very much a rough draft compared to what it is now.
I have spent a lot of time copy-editing OTHER people's work, and copy-editing MY OWN work. One thing I've learned is that polishing one's own manuscipt takes a THOROUGH reading, AND re-reading a few months after that, AND re-re-reading a few months after that. Your eyes will fail to see the hideous mistakes lurking in your own manuscript, because your brain knows what you meant to say. As a matter fact, I had one sentence in my first novel which had a glaring error in it that I never once saw, over a period of months, no matter how much I looked at it: "He had already found out about it already."
So copy-edit, let it rest, then come back to it again.
I have a few other tricks I've learned over the years. One hint: Your writing will get stronger if you find a way to say the same thing with fewer words. When I finished my fourth novel, it absolute raw form it was 57,856. After several months of putting it through the wringer, I got it down to 50,437. And yet even though I got rid of one out of every eight words, the story still says the same thing. That makes the writing much more "tight" and "punchy."