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.
Last week, we talked about how punctuation is the traffic signal that keeps our words flowing smoothly.
If the meaning is understood when two words are combined into one, and common usage writes it as one word, again a hyphen is unnecessary.
But what about !? These mutant morsels of madness are called “interrobangs.”
One of my favorite authors, Ann McCaffrey, set off telepathic conversations with both italics and colons in the place of quote marks.
I certainly didn’t. If these authors hope to find an agent or successfully self-publish, they have a lot of work and self-education ahead of them.
If you are writing in the US, you might consider investing in 
Let’s get two newbie mistakes out of the way:
All three of the above sentences are technically correct. The usage you habitually choose is your voice.
Why are these rules so important? Punctuation tames the chaos that our prose can become. Periods, commas, quotation marks–these are the universally acknowledged traffic signals.
So now, we realize that we must submit our work to contests or publications if we ever want to get our name out there. We have looked at our backlog of short stories and gone out to sites like 
The first thing we’re going to look at is the problem. Is the problem worth having a story written around it? If not, is this a “people in a situation” story, such as a short romance or a scene in a counselor’s office? What is the problem and why did the characters get involved in it?
Worldbuilding is crucial in a short story. Is the setting I have chosen the right place for this event to happen? In this case, I say yes, that it is the only place where such a story could happen.
Point of view: First person – Oriana tells us this story as it happens. We are in her head for the entire story. Do her actions and reactions feel organic and natural? After some work, I think yes, but again, I’ll have to run it by someone to be sure.
I am not the only person who experiences these moments of low creative energy. When this happens, I set the longer work aside and go rogue—I write poetry and drabbles and short stories.
Maybe you are writing, but so far, you have written nothing novel or even novella-length. Perhaps you have been writing a little of this and a bit of that, and now you have a pile of disparate, exceptionally short fiction, and you don’t know what to do with it.
Microfiction is the distilled soul of a novel. It has everything the reader needs to know about a singular moment in time. It tells that story and makes the reader wonder what happened next. Each short piece we write increases our ability to tell a story with minimal exposition.
When submitting to a publication, you send your work directly to the publisher. In return, you can expect to receive a communication from the senior editor, either a rejection or an acceptance.
To wind this up—take another look at that backlog of short work. Edit it, read it aloud, and edit it again. Then, consider submitting that work to a contest or magazine. It’s good experience for indie writers, but more than that, you might hit the jackpot!
I do a lot of rambling in my first drafts because I’m trying to visualize the story. While I try to write this mental blather in separate documents, the random thought processes often bleed over into my manuscript.
40,000 words in fantasy is less than half a book. That makes it a novella. But I send it to my beta reader to see what she thinks. If she feels the plot lacks substance at that length, I let it rest for a while, then come back to it. Then, I can see where to add new scenes, events, and conversations to round out the story arc. That might bring it up to the 60,000-word mark.
In the second draft, I will discover passages where I have repeated myself but with slightly different phrasing. My editor is brilliant at spotting these, which is good because I miss plenty of them when I am preparing my manuscript for editing. I wrote that mess, so even though I try to be vigilant, repetitions tend to blend into the scenery.
I have learned to be brutal. I might have spent days or even weeks writing a chapter that now must be cut.
Even if this story is one part of a series, we who are passionate about the story we’re reading need firm endings.
The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson
When we speak aloud, we habitually use certain words and phrase our thoughts a particular way. The physiology of our throats is unique to us. While we may sound very similar to other members of our family, pitch monitoring software will show that our speaking voice is distinctive to us.
Flynn’s style of prose is rapid-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness, and yet it is controlled and deliberate. She is creative in how she uses the literary device of narrative mode. Primarily, Gone Girl is written in the first person present tense. But sometimes Flynn breaks the fourth wall by flowing into the second person present tense and speaking directly to us, the reader.
“I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.”
In my previous post, we talked about narrative point of view. POV is the perspective, the personal or impersonal “lens” through which we communicate our stories. It is the mode we choose for conveying a particular story.
When I begin my second draft, those weak verb forms function as traffic signals. They were a form of mental shorthand that helped me write the story before I lost my train of thought. But in the rewrite, weak verbs are code words that tell me what the scene should be rewritten to show.
The way we habitually phrase sentences, how we construct paragraphs, the words we choose, and the narrative mode and time we prefer to write in is our voice. It includes the themes we instinctively write into our work and the ideals we subconsciously hold dear.
If we move to a different window, the view changes. Some views are better than others.
Last week, I mentioned head–hopping, a disconcerting literary no-no that occurs when an author switches point-of-view characters within a single scene. I’ve noticed it happens more frequently in third-person omniscient narratives because it’s a mode in which the thoughts of every character are open to the reader.
I find that when I can’t get a handle on a particular character’s personality, I open a new document and have them tell me their story in the first person.
Recognizing where the real drama begins is tricky. Let’s have a look at the novel 
I admire the audacity of having Michell, a protagonist who considers his professional reputation as his most prized possession, commit such a catastrophic action as stealing those original letters. It proves there is potential for drama in the least likely places.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 