Writers fall into three camps: (1) those who actually like the process of putting words on the page; (2) those who dream about their stories, make mood boards and playlists, and know what each of their characters’ favorite breakfast is, but find the writing part excruciating; and (3) those who flourish editing their work once the words are down.
I am 100% in the first camp, which means I don’t know my characters’ favorite breakfasts and I’m not a huge fan of editing. But editing one’s own work is a super important part of the writing process. First drafts are messy. Heck, second and third drafts are too. But if we want stories that are truly ready for others to read, we need to spend the time trudging through edits to find the final draft.
If you’re like me and don’t love editing, here are five tips to make the editing journey just a little easier. Yes, these are “nibble around the edges” tips, but if you don’t like editing, even simple things like these can make the process a little bit less of a slog. You won’t find below tips about wholesale changes and rearrangement of manuscripts, cutting subplots and characters…such edits are beyond the scope of the “tip” category. But these will make the whole affair a bit better.
#1. Read Aloud
Read your manuscript out loud in order to catch clunky dialogue, unintended rhyming, extra wordiness, etc. But be careful – even when you read aloud, you might read words that aren’t there or skip over ones that are. You might also read with emotion that isn’t made known in the actual text. To counteract these tendencies, a writing friend of mine has his computer read the manuscript back to him. The computer doesn’t miss words and reads without emotion, which helps him discern if the writing communicates it alone.
#2. Green and Growing
Print out your manuscript on paper for editing. Use green ink to make your edits so your manuscript looks like its growing instead of bleeding.
#3. Speed Read
On a certain editing pass, read your book as fast as you can, in one to three sittings if possible. This helps you catch two things that are harder to see when reading the manuscript spread out over time:
(1) verbal idiosyncrasies: I talked about these in the last post. These are certain phrases that crop up too often in the text (every book has one of these and they often have to do with describing people’s facial muscles…i.e. “Smiles tugging at the corners of mouths”).
(2) detail consistency: Make sure that all the little details stay consistent, i.e. eye color, season of the year, names, relationship status.
#4. Purge the Addressees
When editing dialogue, pay special attention to how often characters address each other by name (“That’s not what I’m saying, Bob.”) or relationship (“I hear you, Mother.”). This is a super unnatural way to speak and should only be used if characters are trying to get one another’s attention or the situation really really calls for it. And yet when drafting, those names and titles just slip in there all the time! I’ve done editing passes where I’ve cut upwards of 100 addressees from dialogue.
#5. Back to Front
Saving my favorite tip for last: when inputting your handwritten edits into your computer document, start at the end and move to the beginning. This process preserves the page numbers and text setting of your printed document, which makes it easier to find where the edits go on the page.
Adam Thomas, Author 