As an editor, I saw every kind of mistake you can imagine, and before that, as a writer, I made them all. This is why I rely on an editor for my work. Irene sees the flaws that my eye skips over.
When prepping a novel to send to Irene, I use a three-part method. This requires specific tools that come with Microsoft Word, my word-processing program. I believe these tools are available for Google Docs and every other word-processing program. Unfortunately, I am only familiar with Microsoft’s products as they are what the companies that I worked for used.
What follows are three steps that should eliminate most problems in a manuscript.
Part one: Beta Reading is the first look at a manuscript by someone other than the author. I suggest you don’t omit this step unless you can find no one who understands what you need. A good beta reader is a person who reads for pleasure and can gently express what they think about a story or novel. Also, look for a person who enjoys the genre of that particular story. Your beta reader should ask several questions of this first draft (feel free to give them the following list).
Part two: Once I have ironed out the rough spots noticed by my beta readers, this second stage is put into action. Yes, on the surface the manuscript looks finished, but it has only just begun the journey.
In Microsoft Word, on the Review Tab, I access the Read Aloud function and begin reading along with the mechanical voice. Yes, the narrator app is annoying and mispronounces words like “read,” which sound different and have different meanings depending on the context. However, this first tool alerts me to areas that were overlooked in the first stage of revisions.
The most frustrating part is the continual stopping, making corrections, and starting.
I use this function rather than reading it aloud from the monitor, as the computer screen tricks the eye. I tend to see and read aloud what I think should be there rather than what is.
- I habitually key the word though when I mean through or lighting when I mean lightning. Each is a different word but is only one letter apart. Most (but not all} miss keyed words will leap out when you hear them read aloud.
- Most but not all run-on sentences stand out when you hear them read aloud.
- Most but not all inadvertent repetitions also stand out.
- Most of the time, hokey phrasing doesn’t sound as good as you thought it was.
- Most of the time, you hear where you have dropped words because you were keying so fast you skipped over including an article, like “the” or “a” before a noun.
This is a long process that involves a lot of stopping and starting. It takes me well over a week to get through an entire 90,000-word manuscript. I will have trimmed about 3,000 words by the end of this phase. I will have caught many typos and miss keyed words and rewritten many clumsy passages.
But I am not done.
Part three: the manual edit. This is where I make a physical copy and do the work the old-fashioned way.
Everything looks different when printed out, and you will see many things you don’t notice on the computer screen or hear when it is read aloud by the narrator app.
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Illustration by Hugh Thomson representing Mr. Collins protesting that he never reads novels.
Open your manuscript. Make sure the pages are numbered in the upper right-hand corner.
- Print out the first chapter and either staple it together or use a binder clip. If I drop it, the pages will all be together in the proper order.
- Turn to the last page. Cover the page with another sheet of paper, leaving only the final paragraph visible.
- Starting with the final paragraph on the last page, begin reading, working your way forward.
- With a yellow highlighter, mark each place that needs revising.
- With a red pen/pencil, make notes in the margins to guide the revisions. (Red is highly visible, so you won’t miss it when you are putting your corrections into the digital manuscript.
- Put the corrected chapter on a recipe stand next to your computer. Open your manuscript and save it as a new file. (ManuscriptTitle_final_Apr2024.docx.) Begin making the revisions as noted on your hard copy.
- Do the same for each chapter until you have finished revising the entire manuscript.
I look for info dumps, passive phrasing, and timid words. They are signs that a section needs rewriting to make it visual rather than telling. Clunky phrasing and info dumps are signals telling me what I intend that scene to be. Many times, I must cut some of the info and allow the reader to use their imagination.
I will have trimmed another 3 to 4,000 more words from my manuscript by the end of this process.
By the time we begin writing, most of us have forgotten whatever grammar we once knew. But editing software operates on algorithms and doesn’t understand context.
I am wary of relying on Grammarly or ProWriting Aid for anything other than alerting you to possible problems. Look at each thing they point out and decide whether to accept their recommendation or not. They are AI programs and have no real-life experience to draw on.
You’ll get into trouble if you assume the AI editing programs are always correct. Remember, they don’t understand context. Good writing involves technical knowledge of grammar, but voice isn’t about algorithms.
Novels are comprised of many essential components. If one element fails, the story won’t work the way I envision it. It’s been months since a beta reader saw this mess and much has changed. I take a hard look at these aspects:
- Characterization – are the characters individuals?
- Dialogue – do people sound natural? Do they sound alike, or are they each unique?
- Mechanics (grammar/punctuation flaws will be more noticeable when printed out)
- Pacing—how does it transition from action scene to action scene?
- Plot – does the story revolve around a genuine problem?
- Prose – how do my sentences flow? Do they say what I mean?
- Themes – What underlying thread ties the whole story together? Have I used the theme to its best potential?
Being a linear thinker, this process of making revisions works for me. It can take more than a month, but when I’ve finished, I’ll have a manuscript that won’t be full of avoidable distractions. It will be something I can send to my editor. And because I have done my best work, Irene will be able to focus on finding as much of what I have missed as is humanly possible.
If you read as much as I do (and this includes books published by large Traditional publishers), you know that a few mistakes and typos can and will get through despite their careful editing. So, don’t agonize over what you might have missed. If you’re an indie, you can upload a corrected file.
We are all only human, after all.
But we’d prefer the snow to stay in the mountains where it belongs. Something about the slightest dusting sends the Pacific Northwest into a panic.
BBC: From memoir and self-care books to comic novels, writing about our flaws and imperfections has never been so popular. But can failing ever be a success? Lindsay Baker explores this question. Read the story here: 
Also from Publishers Weekly: A confident mood prevailed among independent booksellers over this November holiday sales weekend. (…) Sales data from 
We who write fantasy invent people and give them lives in invented worlds. Their stories involve them doing invented things. Unfortunately, there are times when we realize we have written ourselves into a corner, and there is no graceful way out.
In 2019, I had accomplished many important things with the 3 months of work I had cut from that novel. The world was solidly built, so the first part of the rewrite went quickly. The characters were firmly in my head, so their interactions made sense in the new context.
So, in 2019, I realized the novel I was writing is actually two books worth of story. The first half is the protagonist’s personal quest and is finished. The second half resolves the unfinished thread of what happened to the antagonist. Both halves of the story have finite endings, so the best choice is to break it into two novels.
And a “passel” of short stories and novellas.
I think of 
I still had no idea there was a wider community of writers in my area, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have felt worthy of gate-crashing one of their meetings.
The next book I bought was in 2002: 
Finishing off the resources from the official NaNoWriMo store is Grant Falkner’s handbook, 
Damn Fine Story
Many local libraries offer a service where one can submit a question and have it answered by email. If that isn’t an option and we’re feeling ambitious, you can check out eBooks on any subject.
Here is a link to the great Neil Gaiman’s absolutely wonderful, infinitely comforting, yet utterly challenging advice for writers: 
In 2010, I gained a wonderful local group through attending write-ins for NaNoWriMo. Nowadays, we meet weekly via Zoom, as some members are now living far away from Olympia. My fellow writers are a never-ending source of support and information about both the craft and the industry. We write in various genres and gladly help each other bring new books into the world. But more than that, we are good, close friends.
Food scenes serve as transitions between events. The act of dining occurs, but the conversations are the point of that scene. This is an opportunity to rest and regroup.
I’ve read many unforgettable fantasy books. One that shall go unnamed stands out, but not for a good reason. The author gave each kind of fruit, bird, or herd beast a different, usually unpronounceable, name in the language of her fantasy culture. She must have spent hours devising that hot mess of fantasy foods.
In my current work in progress, my people have a melding of familiar European and New World ingredients for their diet and do a lot of foraging. Fish, maize, and potatoes are essential staples, as are beans and wild greens. For a good list of what this diet might entail, visit this link: 
Also, my first drafts are not written linearly. I write what I am inspired to, skipping the spots I have no clue about. I fill in those places later. Even after completing the first draft, things will change structurally with each rewrite.
It wasn’t exactly literary brilliance, but it gave my idea a jumping-off point. I just began telling the story as it fell out of my mind. Surprisingly, I discovered my word count averaged 2,500 to 3,000 words daily. By day fifteen, I knew I would have no trouble getting to 50,000, and by November 21st, I had passed the 50,000-word mark.
But I took that incoherent mess apart, and over the next ten years, it became three books: 
It helps to check in on the national threads each day. Look at your regional threads on the national website to keep in contact with other local writers. You will find out when and where write-ins are scheduled.
Included in this mess were ten dreadful poems, along with chapters 7 through 11 of 
Conferences are excellent places to make good connections with other writers. You meet people you can talk to about every aspect of the experience of writing as well as craft. No one’s eyes glaze over when you try to explain your main character’s inner demons and you find people with struggles similar to your own.
Some new writers are completely fired up for their novels, obsessed. They go at it full tilt for a week or even two, and then, at the 20,000-word mark, they take a day off. Somehow, they never get back to it. These writers will continue to write off and on and may participate in NaNoWriMo again.
Cooking is my love language. I have many tips and ideas for getting word count and having a proper family feast. As a dedicated writer, I know how to plan for all aspects of life.
How to get inspiration? That translates to getting a story idea. I used to think up nifty situations and wondered how an average person would deal with it. That’s the good ol’ what-if set-up you find mostly used in sci-fi stories. The problem with focusing on the cool idea is that usually the characters who have to deal with it become rather cardboard. That’s fine when you’re a young writer or producing a first draft. Slap it down and keep going. You can come back later to beef up the character, add description details, and so on. Whatever the idea is, get it out of your head at any cost.
What is serious writing? Even if it’s comedy, it’s the writing you take seriously. What you want readers to admire, no matter the genre. That is all well and good, but you will find that what you think is good isn’t always what readers think is good. Got nothing to do with what you’re writing or how well you write it, it’s just the way it is. So don’t take yourself too seriously; you can take your writing seriously, of course. The idea is that the writing will get better for readers each time you go through a manuscript and revise and edit it. How many times you go through it is your decision. It helps to get someone else’s eyes on it at some point, especially if you are new at writing. You can look at a map but until you get to your destination you can’t be sure that map is accurate and you’re going the right way. Sounds like another thing I learned.
I started reading a long time ago. Started writing soon after, making up my own stories which I thought were better than the ones I read. I borrowed here and there – and in later writing had to tone it down so as not to sound like the sources I borrowed from (sci-fi authors, mostly). You develop your own style eventually if you write enough. So write a lot; you don’t have to show it to anyone. I like to try writing in different styles, too. I like trying to have characters speak in different ways, some slang, vernacular, accents, different levels of education, just for my own amusement – which is cruel, I’ll admit. But trying different things is good for a writer. Read different styles, too, and try to imitate them. Read the juicy parts aloud, let them get stuck in your head. Consider what is special about the style the author uses. Compare and contrast with other authors you read, and with your own writing. Most of all, read a lot in different genre and different writing styles. How much you absorb from that differs for everyone, but try it.
Finally you have a complete story (or novel) from beginning to end and the plot is satisfying, characters compelling, dialog crisp, and so on. What next? Read and revise at least three times, but put it away at least a few days between each reading (a month is optimal; go get some coffee). Yes, I know you’re eager to get into it again but make yourself wait. Go to your slush file and work on that erotica. Now back to your masterpiece. Try to read it as a reader who’s never seen it before: what would the average reader think and feel in this scene or on that page? You’re no longer thinking of how to write the story so now you focus on how someone you don’t know might understand it. (Sure, go ahead and correct those pesky mistypes as you find them. No rule saying you have to do that in a separate pass.) I like to look at scenes in isolation: every scene should do something, even if it is “only” showing a character’s personality. I read dialog aloud (or, recently, have my computer read it to me); I catch a lot of mistakes and sloppy or weak sentences that way. Run spellchecker until it’s about to fall off the rails but understand it is not actually reading and still will miss errors. You must read your manuscript with your own eyes and ears more than twice. Look for pet-peeve errors (e.g., I type ‘form’ a lot when I mean ‘from’; obviously the spellchecker will not catch it because ‘form’ is correctly spelled, just the wrong word). I run a search for them. Most importantly, never ever hit “replace all”!
Stephen Swartz is the author of literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and contemporary horror novels. While growing up in Kansas City, he dreamed of traveling the world. His novels feature exotic locations, foreign characters, and smatterings of other languages–strangers in strange lands. You get the idea: life imitating art.
By just doing that, I will have 50,000 (or more) words by midnight on November 30th.
Be willing to be flexible. Do you work best in short bursts? Or, maybe you’re at your best when you have a long session of privacy and quiet time. Something in the middle, a melding of the two, works best for me.
A good way to ensure you have that time is to encourage your family members to indulge in their own interests and artistic endeavors. That way, everyone can be creative in their own way during that hour, and they will understand why you value your writing time so much.
Writers and other artists do have to make some sacrifices for their craft. It’s just how things are. But don’t sacrifice your family for it.
But we all know infodumps are an insidious poison, so how do we apply this backstory without losing the reader?
Character A is a shaman, a fire-mage smith and warrior, and is slated to be the next War Leader of the tribes. His shamanic purpose is to unite the people, both the tribes and those citadels who have turned tribeless. He is the chosen champion of the Goddess his sect of mages serves, and his success or failure will determine her fate.
This void is vital because characters must overcome fear to face it. As a reader, one characteristic I’ve noticed in my favorite characters is they each have a hint of self-deception. All the characters – the antagonists and the protagonists – deceive themselves in some way about their own motives.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 