You’ve finished that manuscript. But wait — it’s still not ready to show to the world! Before you unleash your masterpiece on your adoring public, writer and publisher Maggie Bonham shares some great tips for whipping your work into shape — before you press that “publish” button or submit it to an agent or publisher.
How to Edit Your Own Work
You have the perfect book — you’re sure of it. You’ve tacked “The End” on your manuscript and you’re feeling pretty chuffed now. You either plan to send it off to a publisher or perhaps try your hand at publishing it yourself. But before you do, you’d better get your book into tip-top shape. Otherwise, if you try the conventional route, you’re in for loads of rejections; or if you self publish, loads of bad reviews.
Why Editing is So Vital
Editing is the important side of writing. While you may be tempted to skip this step, or hope that the editor at the conventional publishers will fix your problems–don’t. Believe it or not, that’s not what editors at conventional publishers do any longer. If anything, they do some minor changes and look at the content. If that. Occasionally, you’ll get a kid fresh out of college to copyedit your work who knows less than you do about writing. So, the acquisitions editors now look for manuscripts that are ready to go.
What about self-publishing? Well, if you’re planning on rising above all the dreck that people publish, you’ve got to shine. What’s more, readers compare your work to the best books they’ve read. Sure, it’s grossly unfair, but you can’t pull aside every reader and tell them that. Even if you did, they probably don’t care that your teachers never taught you how to spell correctly, that you suffer from dyslexia, or that your find-and-replace function on your word processor program didn’t do what you wanted. You’re up against some pretty high standards–and if they hate your book, they’ll tell the world how dreadful it is. Don’t give them a reason.
Sailing the Sea of Dreck
As the publisher of Sky Warrior Books, we see loads of bad manuscripts. They’re obviously not edited. While the authors have wonderful ideas, they fall short in execution. We’ve taken a handful of novice authors under our wings, sometimes with completely disastrous results. This is why we’re reticent to taking on books that need loads of work. And while you can self-publish anytime, it’s unlikely you’ll get good reviews or a decent readership if your work is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors — or poor writing. So, let’s look at what you can do to ensure your manuscript is the best it can ever be.
Set It Aside
While it sounds counterintuitive, set your manuscript aside for a few weeks–if not a few months. Work on something else. Plan or write your next book. Write articles or take up a new hobby. Anything to look at your book with fresh eyes. The reason is you’re too close to your book to see the problems that exist. You’ll skip over missed words, word echoes, misspelled words, and grammatical problems without noticing them otherwise. It’ll also give you emotional distance from your work so you can slaughter whole paragraphs, or even whole chapters, at will.
Three Passes, Minimum
You’ve waited long enough and have decided to edit your manuscript. Be sure to give yourself a minimum of three passes through it. The first pass is to tighten up your writing and catch the obvious errors. The second pass is reading your book out loud. The third pass is checking for consistency and holes either in your plot, or if your book is nonfiction, chapters.
The Ten Percent Solution and Other Value-Added Activities
A friend of mine named Ken Rand wrote the best book on editing your own work. The book is titled The 10% Solution, and it is published by a rival press. I get no royalties from this, but I do get the satisfaction of helping you become a better writer. It’s a cheap, quick read that boils down the basics for cleaning up your manuscript. Read it. Memorize it. Follow the directions. I promise that unless you are a painfully slow reader, you can whiz through this book in a couple of hours or less.
How the Ten Percent Solution Works
Basically, Rand outlines what it takes to look for “weasel words,” as my friends and authors call them. These words are what makes your manuscript bog down and become wordy and unreadable. Words like “is,” “was,” “of,” words that end in “ly,” and others should be stricken from your text or used judiciously.
Print out a copy of your manuscript, get a big, fat highlighter, and mark every single instance of those words. Then, go through your manuscript and find out if there’s a better way to say what you wrote without those words. Sometimes there won’t be. Most of the time there will be. Write it down now so you don’t forget and go onto the next sentence you need to evaluate.
Spell Checker Is NOT Your Friend
Ever get a text message from a friend who uses auto-finish on their smartphones? Inevitably the app finishes some of the words with the wrong ones. Sometimes it can be downright funny, but often it’s just annoying. This is why if you’ve come to rely on spell checker — stop now. Words like “their,” “there,” and “they’re” as well as “its” and “it’s” are correctly spelled but terribly wrong depending on context. Don’t know the difference? Learn. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style should be on every writer’s desk. (The term is called homophone, so if you’re ever on “Jeopardy!,” I expect a share.)
Write in Active, not Passive Voice
This rule seems to confuse a number of writers, even those who have been writing awhile. A sentence written in active voice is Subject-Verb-Object. A sentence written in passive voice is Object-Verb-Subject. An example of active voice is: “Jerry wrote the book.” An example of passive voice is: “The book was written by Jerry” or “The book was written.” Obviously the active voice is much clearer and more action-oriented. The first passive sentence is wordy and boring; the second sentence is obscure. Who wrote the book? We don’t know just from that sentence and we must rely on the context surrounding that sentence to understand that Jerry wrote the book. If there is no context surrounding that sentence, then it is confusing to the reader.
Of course, there is a time and place for passive voice, but unless you know what you’re doing, you run the risk of confusing and bogging down your readership, something most of us try not to do. Stick with the Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure whenever possible.
Compounding Problems
Another problem I see is the overuse of compounding sentences. That means that you’re gluing two or more sentences together into what is called a run-on sentence.
It goes something like this: “Joe Bob was a redneck, not the type of Bubba who tossed his beer cans in the back of his pickup, but more the type of guy who would marry his sister, and throw beer cans out the window, plus no sheep were safe whenever he was around, and he really liked his dog, King, just a little too much, if you know what I mean.”
My rule for compounding sentences is to stick with the Subject-Verb-Object structure, and only use one conjunction in a sentence. I just did that in the previous sentence, in case you were looking for an example.
Here’s that unwieldy sentence rewritten: “Joe Bob was a redneck. He wasn’t the type of Bubba who tossed his beer cans in the back of his pickup, but more like the type who tossed them out the window. He was the type of guy who’d marry his sister. No sheep were safe whenever he was around. His dog, King, fled from his sight because he loved that dog a little too much, if you know what I mean.” That’s five whole sentences from that unwieldy mess.
Reading Your Book Out Loud
After you go through your first pass, you need to read your book out loud. Yes, really. Read it to your spouse or significant other, your dog, or the toaster. Whatever works. You’ll catch unwieldy sentences, grammar errors, and word repetitions (called “word echoes”). You may even catch huge holes in your plots, or when you gave your hero blond hair in one scene and brown hair in another. Again, have a print copy available, and make notes on it. You can then make the changes when you sit down at your computer to edit.
Don’t be self-conscious doing this. My dogs love it when I read to them, and they’re pretty non-judgmental. The cats, however may stalk off or fall asleep. The good news is they usually don’t make editorial comments, and as far as I know, they don’t read my books. So read out loud, and catch those nasty problems that will hurt you if you send it out to a publisher or self-publish it.
Third Time Is the Charm
The third pass you need to go through your work and check for inconsistencies, plot holes, and narrative description. This is a crucial phase, so don’t skip it.
Book Structure
First, you should pay attention to the structure of your book. That means your book should have a beginning, inciting action, rising action, climax. falling action, and denouement (or wrap-up). You can go into a more complex story arc by fitting it into the three-act play structure, or “The Hero’s Journey,” as defined by by Joseph Campbell and written about by Christopher Vogler (The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers). At this stage, you need to have your book together in a coherent structure, or your readership will give you bad reviews and throw your book against the wall.
Dump the Infodups
If your book has “infodumps” – that is, paragraph after paragraph of explanations–you need to get rid of them. Nothing bogs down a reader like infodumps. When I see them, the book gets a rejection. What you need to do instead is tell the reader only what he or she needs to know. That means the reader doesn’t care about what your protagonist’s past is like until it become relevant for the action. Don’t write about Bob’s abusive childhood until it’s important to the story.
Don’t do this: “Bob had been beaten up by his foster dad every day until he was sixteen when he ran away from home. He still called his mom every Friday and they talked about the weather, his new job, and his other siblings. He never talked about his foster father, whom he hated.”
Do this instead:
Bob picked up his cell phone and pulled up his mom’s number. The phone rang once and his mom answered.
“Hello, Bob?”
“Yeah, mom. How’s Lil and Jenny?”
“Uh, well, okay,” his mom said. There was hesitation in her voice that Bob didn’t like. “When are you coming home?”
“I’m not, you know I can’t with Harold around.” Bob rubbed his arm that still ached from the bruises his foster father had given him. “The man should be in prison for what he’s done.”
“Don’t say that,” his mom whispered.
See the difference?
I hope by now I’ve given you enough to think about when editing your manuscript. Good luck and I look forward to seeing you in print.
MAGGIE BONHAM
Maggie Bonham is an award-winning writer and editor of more than 30 books and more than a thousand articles. She has written articles on science, pets, sustainability, hunting, technology, outdoors and recreation, food, writing, publishing, careers, and other topics. She is also a publisher.
The post How to Self-Edit Your Manuscript for Publication appeared first on DIY Author.