It’s exhausting. You just experienced the highs and lows of a
love story, maybe some tragedy, a little danger, experienced betrayal, of
course there were tears, and finally you’ve done some victory laps. When you
write a novel or any fiction short story, you feel as if you are living through
everything right alongside you favorite main characters. So by the time you
type those magical words THE END you just want to sit back, kick off your shoes
and look forward to attaching that manuscript to an email and shipping it off
to your publisher. DON’T.
If you are like me you didn’t do much, if any, editing along
the way — you were too focused on getting the story down. Well kudos, you
accomplished that. But again, if you are like me, you start to re-read your
work and cringe as you come across misspellings, grammatical errors and maybe
even a loss of chronological order. Yep, it is time to start the first of
serious editing. I can’t say this often enough or emphatically enough, don’t
rely on your word processing spell-check. Yes, I do run spell-check during one
of my earliest edits but I never let it make automatic corrections; there are
times I’ve purposely misspelled a word like when I want a hint of an accent or
dialect, or a character’s proper name may be confused with a regular word such
as Krista and crystal. After spell check has done its job of pointing out where
some corrections need to be made, I read through it again; if I had mistakenly
typed the word connections instead of corrections the meaning would be very
different and yet spell-check would have just given it a pass. Personally check
your spelling and your use of homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, etc.
Go through your story and check for continuity. If you write
an outline as you read through your copy, writing specifically what happens in
the next paragraph or two, you will usually be able to pick out when the
chronological order is askew. Make sure that if a character dies off in one
scene they aren’t sitting down to dinner in the next. Check to make sure that
the relevant items that appear in a scene don’t just magically appear from thin
air. If a character grabs a gun in a fight scene make sure that the gun was already
there, came in with one of the characters or was pulled out of a drawer or such;
make sure that the appearance of things or people sounds logical. And don’t
waste time or words describing every little intricate detail of the setting if
it has no relevance on the plot.
Tighten up your writing; instead of saying He began to run replace it with He ran. If you threw an extra character
into a scene but any other character could have accomplished the task just as
easily, then maybe you need to eliminate that very minor and very extra individual
(for instance unless you are trying to emphasize opulence, is there really any
reason for an upstairs maid to appear to hand her employer a handkerchief? Every
character that you introduce into your manuscript should have some kind of
impact on that story. Cut out useless words that tend to distract the reader by
weakening the narrative or dialogue. Keep your cast of characters clear and functional
so that your readers don’t require a proverbial score card to keep track.
Now that you’ve gone through the manuscript multiple times
and hopefully have had a professional editor (or at least a trusted friend)
review it, read through it one more time and if you still like it, now is the
time to submit. However most publishers will then read it through themselves
and send it right back to you with a list of recommended revisions for the
story; they will also check for typos and misused commas, etc. The irony is
that no matter how many times you checked it, your publisher will inevitably
find something! Sometimes you may feel that your publisher’s recommendations change
too much of your vision for the project and you don’t want to do that. Here are
your options: sometimes you have enough of an established relationship to
gently query, but probably not so just go ahead and make those revisions; or
you can balk and refuse and then see if you can find someone else to publish
the book because your original publisher won’t want to.
Once you type THE END you can stretch, take a walk, eat a
meal, or even get a night’s sleep — but then it is right back to work.
Writing Exercise:
Use your most recent manuscript, or if you don’t have one of your own
choose a book you recently read, and practice writing blurbs. 1) Write two to
three sentences and include the genre, the conflict, and mention your main
character(s); don’t include spoilers; use key words that will catch the
attention of search engines and readers. This could be used for an online book
description or the back cover and should be no more than 200 words. 2) Choose a
short one sentence quip about your story, keep it under 140-characters, that
will create interest (for my book Karma
Visited I used the line Do you believe
in karma?). Ideally your quip will be short enough to include two to three
relevant hash tags when using this one-line blurb as a Tweet or on Facebook.
Writing Prompt:
Choose a random picture from any magazine or newspaper, do NOT read any
accompanying caption. Write a caption based solely on what you see in the
picture. Another quick exercise is to choose four to five random pictures and
right a sentence or two about each in story form so that one picture’s mini-story
flows into the next.
Challenge Assignment:
Choose a magazine or newspaper feature article and edit it so that it
only takes up approximately two thirds of its original space WITHOUT losing any
pertinent information. And if you should find any typos or grammatical errors,
correct them as well.
