Reading Your Own Work Like a Stranger

The hardest problem in revision is not finding what's wrong with the draft. Most writers, given enough distance from the work, can find plenty wrong with it. The hardest problem is seeing the draft accurately, seeing what's actually on the page rather than what you remember intending to put there, what you intended to communicate rather than what the language is actually doing, what the reader will experience rather than what you experienced writing it.

You are the worst possible reader of your own work, in a specific and remediable way. You have too much context. You know what every sentence was trying to do, what every word was reaching for, what the structure was supposed to achieve, what the piece was supposed to be about. This knowledge fills in the gaps, reads the ambiguous sentence as clear because you know what you meant, reads the underdeveloped section as complete because you know what you were trying to say, reads the piece as more coherent and more alive than it actually is on the page because your experience of writing it was coherent and alive.

The stranger who reads your draft doesn't have any of this context. They have only what's on the page. The sentence that seemed clear to you is ambiguous to them because the context that made it clear is yours and not theirs. The section that felt developed is thin to them because the feeling of development was your experience of writing it and not a quality of the text. The piece that felt alive in the writing may or may not be alive in the reading, and you can't tell the difference because you can't access the reading from inside the writing.

Learning to read your own work like a stranger is one of the most significant skills in revision and one of the hardest to develop. This piece is about how to develop it.

The Distance Requirement

The most fundamental requirement for reading your own work with anything approaching a stranger's eyes is time.

The writer who revises immediately after writing is still inside the experience of writing. The draft is warm. The intentions are vivid. The process of composition is too recent to be distinguishable from the experience of reading. In this state, you cannot see what the draft actually is. You can only see what you were trying to make.

The draft needs to go cold before you can read it accurately. How cold depends on the length and the complexity of the piece, and on how intensely you were involved in the writing. A short essay might need a few days. A longer piece might need a few weeks. A novel might need months. The general principle is that you need enough distance that the experience of writing the draft is no longer accessible as a substitute for reading it.

This is one of the most consistently given pieces of writing advice and one of the most consistently ignored, because the pressure to continue, to fix the problems while you remember what you were doing, to keep the momentum going, makes the waiting feel like a loss of something. What actually gets lost when you revise too soon is the possibility of accurate reading. What gets found when you wait is the draft as the reader will encounter it, which is the only version of the draft that matters for revision.

While the draft is cooling, write something else. Start the next piece. Work on a different project. Do something that uses the creative attention so that returning to the cooled draft is a genuine return rather than a continuation.

The Physical Distance

Changing the medium of the draft, printing it if it was written on screen, reading it on screen if it was written on paper, tends to produce a quality of strangeness that supports more accurate reading.

The medium change works because it alters the perceptual experience of encountering the text in small ways that interrupt the familiarity of your own work. The draft on paper looks different from the draft on screen. The font change, the line spacing, the physical presence of the pages, all of these create a slight perceptual novelty that makes the text slightly less yours and slightly more like an object you're encountering from outside.

Reading it aloud is another form of physical distance that produces one of the most reliable forms of accurate reading available. When you read aloud you hear the draft rather than reading it, and the ear catches things the eye reading silently misses. The sentence that scans as clear visually reveals itself as convoluted when spoken. The rhythm problem that wasn't visible becomes audible. The word that's wrong for the sentence announces itself when the voice stumbles over it. The passage that's alive and working produces a physical pleasure in the speaking that the flat passage doesn't.

Reading aloud is tedious for long pieces and essential for short ones, and worth doing for at least the most important sections of anything. It's probably the single most effective technique for catching problems that the familiar eye misses.

And reading in a genuinely different space, not the space where the writing was done, changes the relationship to the material in ways that support more accurate reading. The draft read in the place where it was written carries the spatial associations of the writing. Read somewhere else, it's slightly more like someone else's work.

The Reader's Questions

When you read your own draft with the attempt to simulate a stranger's experience, the questions you ask need to shift from the writer's questions to the reader's questions.

The writer's questions are about intention. Did I say what I meant? Is this section doing what I wanted it to do? Does this character behave in the way I intended?

The reader's questions are about experience. What is this piece actually doing to me? What am I understanding and what am I not? Where does my attention engage and where does it drift? What do I want more of and what do I want less of? Where does the piece seem to know where it's going and where does it seem uncertain?

The reader's questions produce more useful information for revision because they're about the text's actual effects rather than about the gap between intention and execution. The revision that addresses the text's actual effects on a reader tends to produce a better piece than the revision that addresses the gap between intention and execution, because the gap is a writer's problem and the effects are the reader's experience, and the reader's experience is what ultimately matters.

The Trusted Reader

The closest approximation to a stranger's eyes that most writers can access is an actual reader, someone who will encounter the draft without the context of having written it. This is the trusted reader, the writing group, the editor, the beta reader, whoever constitutes the first audience for your work before it reaches its public audience.

The trusted reader is not the same as the stranger. They have their own context, their own aesthetic preferences, their own relationship to you and to your work. Their reading is not a pure sample of stranger-reading. But it's significantly less contaminated by your own context than your reading of your own work, and the questions a trusted reader raises about their experience of the draft tend to be more accurate information about what the draft is actually doing than your own reading can provide.

The specific skill in using trusted reader feedback is not accepting it wholesale, which produces the complete absorption failure mode discussed in the Showing Up section, but using it as evidence about where the draft's effects on a reader differ from your intended effects on a reader. When a trusted reader is confused by something you thought was clear, that's evidence that the clarity was in your context rather than on the page. When a trusted reader is disengaged by a section you thought was important, that's evidence that the section's importance wasn't successfully communicated. When a trusted reader is more engaged than you expected by something you thought was minor, that's evidence that the draft has found something more interesting than you knew you were doing.

This evidence doesn't tell you what to do in revision. It tells you where the gap between your reading and a reader's reading is largest, and those gaps are where the most important revision work tends to be needed.

Reading for Different Things

One of the techniques that experienced writers use to approximate stranger-reading is separating the revision into passes that read for different things, reading for the structure of the piece as a whole and then for the logic of individual sections and then for the language of individual sentences and paragraphs.

Each pass benefits from treating the previous pass's concerns as resolved, as much as possible, and attending only to the current pass's concern. The structural pass that notices sentence-level problems but doesn't stop to fix them, just notes them and continues. The sentence-level pass that doesn't go back to restructure sections, just works with the sentences in front of it. Each pass produces a fresher encounter with the specific dimension of the piece it's attending to.

This approach also tends to produce better work at each level than the single undifferentiated revision pass that addresses everything simultaneously. When you're simultaneously trying to restructure the piece, improve the logic, and polish the sentences, each concern competes with the others for attention. Separating them lets each concern receive the focused attention it deserves.

A rough sequence for the passes: first read for the overall shape, what's there and what's not, where the structure serves the piece and where it fights it; second read for the logic and development, whether each section follows from the previous one and leads to the next; third read for the sentences, the language, the rhythm, the word choices. This sequence, large to small, tends to prevent the polishing of sentences that will later need to be cut when the structure changes, which is one of the most common revision inefficiencies.

Annotating Rather Than Revising

When reading your own draft with the attempt to see it accurately, the impulse to fix problems as you find them tends to interrupt the reading and pull you back into the writing orientation. The fixing reactivates the intentions and the context that make accurate reading difficult.

An alternative is to read through the whole draft without fixing anything, annotating what you notice as a reader, what's working, what isn't, where you're confused, where you're engaged, where the piece seems to know what it's doing and where it doesn't, and then to use the annotations as the guide for the revision pass that follows.

This read-and-annotate approach produces something like a document of the stranger's reading, a record of what the piece is actually doing to a reader, that you can then use as a map for the revision. The annotations made during the reading are more honest assessments of the text's effects than the revisions made in the moment of reading, because they're made from the reading orientation rather than from the writing orientation that fixing activates.

The annotations can be as simple as a word or two in the margin. Working. Slow. Lost here. Good. What is this? Don't understand. Nice. Too long. These brief notes accumulate into a picture of the draft's effects that tends to be more accurate and more useful than the picture that reading produces without them.

The Stranger You're Trying to Read Like

Here's something worth being specific about, because the generic stranger is less useful than a specific one.

The stranger you're trying to read like when you revise your own work is not just any reader. It's the specific reader the piece is for, the reader who has the preparation to receive what the piece is doing and the genuine interest in what the piece is about, but who doesn't have your context or your intentions.

Keeping this specific reader in mind when you read for revision tends to produce more focused and more useful readings than reading for an imagined general audience. The question isn't whether any possible reader would follow this but whether this reader, the one the piece is for, can follow it. Some things that would confuse a general reader are exactly right for the specific reader. Some things that seemed necessary for a general reader are obvious to the specific reader and slow the piece down.

The revision that's aimed at the specific reader tends to be more purposeful and produces a more focused piece than the revision that's aimed at everyone. And the focused piece tends to find its specific readers more reliably than the piece that's been revised toward a general audience that doesn't exist.

The Practice of Seeing

Learning to read your own work accurately is a practice that develops over a long time. The early attempts tend to be significantly contaminated by the writer's context, and the improvements come gradually, through the accumulated experience of reading your own work, comparing your reading to readers' readings, noticing where the gaps are largest, and developing a calibrated sense of where your own reading tends to be least accurate.

Most writers find that they have specific and predictable blind spots in their reading of their own work. The section they always think is clear that readers always find ambiguous. The passage they always think is moving that readers always find overwrought. The structural move they always think is invisible that readers always find jarring. Knowing your specific blind spots tends to produce better self-readings over time, because you know where your reading is least trustworthy and can apply extra scrutiny there.

The goal is not to fully become the stranger, which is probably not possible for the person who wrote the draft. The goal is to develop enough honest reading that the most significant gaps between your reading and a stranger's reading become visible rather than invisible.

The draft is a stranger's document before the revision is done. Learn to read it that way.