How to implement like professional writing and editing services?

Editing your work will make all the difference between messy manuscript and clean draft.

You did what you said you would and wrote a novel. All you need to do now is send it to an agent, or to professional writing and editing services or publish it yourself. Right? I wouldn’t, not yet. The chances are it’s not good enough at the moment, but take heart. Tolstoy redrafted War and Peace twelve times before it was ready for the rest of us to read.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Separate yourself from your novel

If you’ve written 80,000 of a novel, the chances are you feel you know your fictional world as well as your real one. To you, it makes complete sense. You understand what each of your characters mean when they speak. You can see that alien jungle clearly in your mind’s eye. Read your story through now and you will have an almost perfect sense of what you were trying to convey. But your readers are not telepathic. They only have your words.

This is why, if you can, it’s a good idea to put your novel in a drawer at this point. The one luxury aspiring authors have over those with a book deal is time. However excited you are about your story, put it away for as long as you can perhaps three to six months. Meanwhile, get on with other projects perhaps you’ll see a short story published. If you’ve the energy, start a new novel.

Print your manuscript out

Now you’re as ready as you’ll ever be to read it through as if it’s somebody else’s work. If you can afford to, print it out. For the good of the environment, I wouldn’t do this too often, but it will help pick up errors you haven’t seen on your computer screen. Use every trick you can to see your work in a new light. If you can’t afford paper, try changing the font.

Read it all the way through

Read it all the way through, making notes about what you want to change, but don’t get bogged down in corrections. Think of the big picture. ‘This is so slow!’ ‘What is this character doing here?’ Come back to your semicolons later. Remember how long you’ve waited to see this with fresh eyes.

Avoid self-destruction

Perhaps you’re wondering how could you have written this stuff? How could you have thought it was good? You realise you’re an awful writer. You should give up now. Throw the manuscript in the bin before anyone accidentally reads it.

Stop! Relax!

Many published authors believe you should ‘draft fast, edit slow.’ Good books develop from dreadful first drafts. Turning your work in progress from okay to great is all part of the process.

It would be irresponsible of me to recommend slowly killing yourself with drink and cigarettes at this point, but I can understand why Hemingway and Chandler abused them. For healthconcious 21st century writers, I suggest watching YouTube, where you can find plenty of bestselling and prize-winning authors talking about first drafts with meandering plots, boring characters and plenty of clichés.

Make a plan

Editing a novel of 80,000 words is an immense proposition. It’s easy to get caught in a loop where you never finish. How you tackle this is actually up to you, but make a plan and stick to it. Are you going to manage this chapter by chapter, or are you going to run through the whole book many times, dealing with individual issues? And what order are you going to do this in?

Write a synopsis

Some people suggest content writing courses while writing a synopsis so that at this point to clarify the plot. Try at least to answer the following questions:

1. What is your starting point and main character?
2. What happens to set the story in motion?
3. What does the main character want?
4. What does the main character need?
5. What obstacles must they overcome?
6. What choices do they face?
7. Where is the highest tension point?
8. How does the story resolve?

Big stuff first

It makes sense to look at the big picture first. There’s no point getting your punctuation perfect in a chapter you’re going to delete.

Plot

Are there unnecessary scenes/characters/arcs? Does the story focus on the right things? Is there too much or too little emphasis on particular people or arcs? Should your subplot really be your main one and vice versa? Are the stakes high enough to interest your reader? Do you hold back from putting the characters in real difficulty, just because you can’t work out how to get them out?

Your plot holes may be little puckers or massive black holes. But once you’ve sorted those out, does anything feel contrived? If you haven’t already, I suggest creating a timeline. There’s software available to help. Avoid that eleven-month pregnancy or three-month degree.

Overall pacing

Do things happen in the right order? Could you make a better narrative by moving things around? Do you resolve the biggest conflict in chapter two, leaving the reader to wonder what the rest of the book is about?

Do some things happen too fast? Or does the story drag on in some places? Are there things you pass over too quickly?

Are the subplots developed, or are they just there to amuse you or bulkup your word count?

Characters

Now you know your characters better, would they always react as you’ve described? Is there an explanation when they act illogically? Are there characters you could get rid of without any detriment to the story (I know they feel like real people, but it really is legal to do this). Could you merge two characters fulfilling the same purpose?

Voice

Do the points of view work? Have you too many to care about the characters? Could you do with another one or two? Would third person work better than first? Should you change the past tense into present?

Scenes

Does the important action happen on stage? Or do we hear about a character’s death in casual conversation? Make sure each scene has a purpose. It should either move forward the plot, or our understanding of a character or situation. Ideally both. Your scenes should work as hard as possible.

Prose

Description

The amount of description you choose to put in your novel is mainly personal choice. Hemingway was celebrated for his spare prose, saying as much as he could in as few words as possible, whereas JK Rowling’s success is often attributed to her detailed descriptions.

Are you telling us your main character is kind when you could simply show the evidence and allow the reader to make up their own mind? Perhaps he’s the child who’s given up their career to look after their parent. Perhaps he drives a mini because he’s given away his inheritance.

Are you telling us she’s tall, when you could show her stooping to kiss her friend, or hear her describing the view from over other people’s heads?

Dialogue

Are you using your dialogue to dump information on the reader, or are you using it to move the plot forward, or reveal a character’s action?

You can feed information to the reader through dialogue, but it has to be drip by drip or it will ruin their suspension of disbelief. Who starts a conversation in a coffee shop with ‘As you know, Tracey, I’m a 33-year-old nursery nurse?’

If you want your reader to almost forget they’re reading, get rid of as many dialogue tags as possible. Ideally, where you do use them, stick to ‘he said’ or ‘she asked’. ‘He expostulated’ and ‘she clamoured’ draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

Style

Aim for economical, clear prose. Do you say the same thing several times over in different ways, so that your reader is screaming ‘Yes! Yes! I get it!’? At a lower level, do you repeat an unusual word? (‘If’ and ‘the’ are fine, but you probably don’t want to use a word like ‘irascible’ more than once a novel). Try to use one strong verb for action instead of a verb and an adverb. She belted him instead of She hit him hard.

Details

Look out for continuity errors. Do your hero’s eyes change colour half-way through? Has your heroine begun a scene eating pasta and finished it scoffing Thai curry? (Guilty!) 

Show your work to other people At this point, you need people ideally other writers who understand the process and who are neither your mum nor your grandma to read your work and tell you honestly what they think. If they’re doing their job properly this will probably hurt.

In her essay This Crafty Feeling, Zadie Smith talks of the ideal time to edit your work being ten minutes before you’re about to go on stage at a literary festival to read it, now published, aloud to a large audience. You can approximate this level of insight by reading your work aloud at a critique group. Or at least to yourself. (If this makes you feel a little silly, you could try using your computer’s text to speech software.)

Spelling and grammar

Bad spelling will put agents and editors off. Never underestimate the power of grammar for good and bad. As Lynne Truss points out, the addition and subtraction of a comma can give the title of her book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, two very different meanings. A panda usually eats shoots and leaves (often bamboo). An extra comma means he uses a gun and is probably now wanted by the police. Look out for homophones. Make sure you’re using the right one (eg they’re, their or there).

Discover what works best for you

I’ve given you some ideas, but there are really no hard and fast rules for editing. Some people thoroughly comb their prose as they write, so their first draft is very similar to their final one. But this is your manuscript. Work out your own process of editing through trial and error. Good luck!