I recently read the autobiography of Australian Cosmo's most famous editor, Mia Freedman.  In it, Freedman noted that all great editors have one thing in common:

They edit their magazine from their audience's perspective, not their own.

We writers hear, over and over again, the advice: "Write for your audience."

Make your topic relevant to your reader's life.  Use words and examples your audience will understand.  Understand that most of us are bombarded by demands on our attention from the moment we wake up, so your piece of writing must catch your reader's attention from the get-go and prove itself worthy of a few precious minutes/hours of your reader's life.

But if you stop there, you're stopping too soon.

Don't just write for your audience.  Edit for your audience.

Why Writers Must Also Be Readers

See your first draft through a reader's eyes.  Try to imagine that you'd never read this story before.  Induce temporary amnesia; pretend that your mind is a tabula rosa.

What questions do you have?  What don't you understand?  What do you find slow?  What do you wish was explained more?

Being able to see your own work through a reader's eyes is a crucial skill when it comes to editing your first draft.

Often, what you thought you wrote isn't actually what's on the page.  You thought you were being daring, terse, mysterious, et cetera, but, when you re-read it with new eyes, you see that the passage is actually too brief, complicated or confusing.  Don't see this as criticism; no one gets their first draft right.  (Who knows how much better Kerouac could have been if he'd bothered to edit?)

Editing is Your Job, Not Your Editor's

Many writers leave that kind of work for their editor.  Editors are highly skilled in reading a book or an article from the perspective of their target market.

But having an editor doesn't let you off the hook.

If you don't put in the work of understanding your book as it will be read by your audience, then someone else will do it for you -- and you don't have any guarantee that the changes they suggest will be congruent with your vision.

Great writers edit with one goal in mind: to communicate their vision in words that will inspire the same vision in the mind of their reader.

In other words, you want your reader to imagine exactly what you imagined.  You want your reader to see the picture you painted with words as clearly as you saw it in your mind's eye.  You want your reader to feel certain emotions on cue.

But sometimes your words can betray you.

Just look at book reviews.  What are the chances that a reviewer will understand a book exactly as the writer intended?  What are the chances that all the reviewers of a particular book will come to the same understanding?

Slim, right?

Clearly, all works are open to some degree of interpretation, but the success of a story, in the writer's mind, depends on whether it is able to convey to readers what the writer intended.

Take William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.  Faulkner had a dream in which he saw a girl up a tree.  (I'm remembering this from university literature class from ten years ago; bear with me if I've forgotten the details.)  He tried to convey the powerful emotional impact of this image in four different ways, using four different narrators.  In the end, he believed he'd failed.

As writers, we don't want to fail.

We want our readers to read the story we wrote.  We don't want them to interpret our words in a way that misrepresents what we were trying to achieve.

How to Edit from Your Reader's Perspective

Once you understand that the way you read something you just wrote is very different from the way your eventual audience will read it, you can begin constructing a bridge to get yourself over to the other side, where you can look back at your work from your reader's perspective.

To do this, it's helpful to have a clear picture of who your target audience is.

Do the research.  Get inside your reader's head.  Understand what makes your reader tick.  What does your reader want: to be inspired, to be taught, to escape, or something else entirely?  What other kinds of books does your reader buy?  How much free time does your reader have to spend on reading?

The more information you have, the better.

Then, give yourself a break from your story if you can.  Leave it for a week.

When you finally come back to it, try to put yourself in your reader's shoes.  Observe what goes through your mind as you read.  Observe where your mind starts to wander.  Note how you feel as you read.  Jot down notes, but don't jump in and start editing right away.  Read all the way through to the end.

You need to be honest with yourself.  Don't shrink away from the "awful truth."  If something isn't working, it's better to know now while you can still fix it.

Sometimes, it can help to re-read your story in a different format.  If you wrote it on the computer, print it out.  I often find that I can spot problems more easily in printed material than I can in a word processor.  I can disassociate from the words and pretend that someone else wrote them, so that I don't feel so emotionally attached.

When you get really good at this, you can "feel" your way through your work and easily spot places in need of an edit.  It's almost like certain passage have an electrical charge: you can feel their energy.  Sometimes, the energy flow gets cut off by a problematic sentence or image, and the obstacle must be removed for the energy to flow again.

Your Reader is Always Right

Sometimes, as writers, it can be tempting to dismiss "wrong" interpretations of our work by saying, "Well, that person just didn't 'get it.'"

Actually, if a reader is reading something other than what we thought we wrote, then the mistake may very well be ours.

You want to be able to write so clearly that your reader can get what you're on about with no hesitation.  Your story unfolds in such a simple, obvious way that your reader has only one choice of which emotion to feel: your choice. You become adept at playing with your reader's emotions, for you understand that reading is just as much an emotional experience as it is an intellectual experience.

If your reader feels confused or isn't satisfied, don't blame anyone.  Your reader isn't stupid.  You're not a bad writer.  Rather, see it as a positive thing: your reader has just helped you spot something that needs to be fixed.  Fix it, and you're good to go.

But please, please, please don't leave it to your editor.

It's your responsibility to present a work so polished that your reader must experience the story exactly as you intended.

That's a hallmark of great writing.