"🖊️ Self-editing is the secret ingredient to crafting impeccable prose. Polish your words with care, removing imperfections and presenting your readers with a literary masterpiece. #WritingTips #SelfEditing #WriterLife"

https://youtu.be/LGhDtNNc7DM

"🖊️ Self-editing is the secret ingredient to crafting impeccable prose. Polish your words with care, removing imperfections and presenting your readers with a literary masterpiece. #WritingTips #SelfEditing #WriterLife"

https://medium.com/humans-are-stories/3-essential-personalities-of-a-writer-548987944387

@kendraleonard I do. My methods are for prose editing.

First, and one of the most critical, is do not edit immediately after finishing a book. You can and probably should read it once just to get a sense of the story as a whole (but do not get sucked into editing at this point, Let it sit for a month. This gives you the chance to view it with fresh eyes. This is not wasted time; your brain will be working on it unconsciously.

The first edit is the developmental edit. This is the edit where you concentrate most on the story itself. Are there plot holes, plot points you foreshadowed but forgot to write later, does the story satisfy or did it go off in a wrong direction? Look at pacing, is is too fast or too slow. Carefully consider the first chapter. Does it hook the reader right away and make them want to keep reading? Do you have character growth arcs for your main characters. Are your secondary characters cardboard cut-outs or so they feel like real people? Is there someone that readers will relate to? Have you included enough backstory to make your world feel lived in. If you are writing speculative fiction, have you defined the universe well enough that people will understand what is happening. If it is a series book and not the first one, can a reader who has never read the first one understand what is going on? Do you have enough or too much description? Look at your percentage of telling versus showing. There should be some of both, but showing should be in the majority by a good bit. Are there major inconsistencies? Have you foreshadowed? How well does the book follow the expectations of readers in your genre?

Do not make changes as go in developmental editing. Make notes instead. When you get to making the changes, put up the notes and the document at at he same time and cross off items as you finish them. Remember, in developmental editing, a change may require you to move through many chapters, so don’t cross off too early unless you are sure.

Now on to the other edits. The first polishing edit is next. You look at grammar, word choice, flow of words, run on sentences, etc. If you are not experienced, use a style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style. This will help keep your use of the various rules consistent. This is hard and painful to do at first. But do it anyway. This is also one of the best ways to drill those rules into your head through repetition and it will be much easier in subsequent books to get the rules consistent. But since this is fiction, remember that people do not always talk in grammatically correct sentences. Don’t lose the voice of your characters by adhering too closely to the style guide. The key is to make the choice for someone to speak incorrectly to be deliberate. Understand when you break the rules and why you broke them. Readers can tell the difference between a deliberate breaking of the rules and when the author clearly didn’t understand the rules.

Speaking of conversation, this is where you look at the voice of the characters and their word choices. John and Mary should not speak exactly the same way. Perhaps Mary has more education and her speech is more correct and her vocabulary more extensive. John might use a lot of words and acronyms associated with his profession. Harold might be prone to swearing. Carolyn might be flirty. And so on.

And in this edit, make sure that you have the necessary dialog tags. If you lose track of who is speaking, then the readers certainly will. You don’t have to have dialog tags on every paragraph of dialog especially when only two characters are present. But when you don’t, it should still be clear who is speaking. Dialog tags should 90+% be said, asked, or a sentence about the person speaking. Use other dialog tags sparingly. And make sure that only one person speaks in an individual paragraph. And if a person speaks in multiple paragraphs in a row, look up the rule for how to handle that.

At this point , I usually send out to my beta readers, so they have time to read it while I work on the other edits.

My next edit is to use a software-based check. I use ProWritingAid, but there are others. This will catch a lot of the picky little things your eyes glossed over. They key to using this type of software is to understand that that are not allays correct and even when they are technically correct, it is not always correct for your particular book. Using this kind of edit is all about your judgment. If you follow every suggestion, your book will not work as well. For instance, it will identify sentences as passive voice. And while , yes, you should not use passive voice extensively, there are times when it is the right choice. And there are times when you need it as a short rest from the action. This is where your judgment comes in. My personal rule of thumb is if the person or thing who took the action is not important, let the passive voice stand. But I use less than 10% passive voice sentences. I can afford to be picky about whether I keep them or not. If you have lots of passive voice, fix most of them.

At this point I will be hearing from my beta readers. I will go through their suggestions and decide which ones I will implement. Not all suggestions from beta readers are good ones and multiple beta readers almost certainly means they will have mutually exclusive suggestions. Again, your judgment is key here.

At this point, the book should be in pretty good shape. This is the point where you have someone read the book to you (or let software do it, I get Scrivener to read mine.) Things you should get from this edit are word flow, wrong word choice, repetitive words. In other words, things that just didn’t sound right. I’ve broken up run-on sentences, changed form to from, fixed character names that suddenly morphed (Brian did not change his name to Brain). I’ve realized I used certainly too often.

As you are editing, you might want to take notes as you go on things you might want to check globally. If you misspell a character’s name once, you will want to make sure it didn’t happen again. If you know you are using a particular word, too often, you will want to check all uses of that word. At this point, make those global changes.

Now, one final edit to make sure that you didn’t break anything while editing. For instance, I once moved a paragraph to a new location and forgot to delete it from the old one. And do a little final polishing. You can polish forever, so make this one the last. I find that the sentences I change are ones that bothered me a bit in earlier edits, but I decided not to change. My personal rule is if this is the third time that sentence has bothered me, I will change it even if it is a perfectly good sentence. And, of course, I fix anything I notice is still broken.

#Writing #WritingLife #WritingCommunity #Editing #SelfEditing

Tomorrow I'm teaching a workshop on editing your own writing for WritespaceHouston. This will be for fiction/nf/poetry of all kinds. My own methods for prose include reading out loud and looking for the long sentences my brain likes to write. For poetry, it's similar: what is the essence of the line, why do I break the line where I do, what about the language is memorable? Y'all got additional tips/methods? #Writing #WritingLife #WritingCommunity #Editing #SelfEditing

On March 11, join me for a Writespace workshop on self-editing I'll give you tactics and tools to edit your own work, no matter what genre or field it is.

What does it mean to really think like an editor? How can we bring the editorial gaze and frame to editing and improving our own work? Self-editing can be tough, but in this workshop, we’ll use various methods to evaluate our writing from a professional editor’s point of view, work on reading what we’ve written through an objective lens, and learn how to strengthen our poetry or prose by being our own most demanding editors.

All levels are welcome; participants should bring a piece or writing to work on during the workshop.

#Writing #Editing #SelfEditing #WritingWorkshop #WritingCommunity

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/self-editing-for-all-genres-kill-your-darlings-tickets-525922948697

Want a simple way to increase #readership for your posts to your #blog and to every form of #SocialMedia? Define the abbreviations & acronyms you use. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kokedit_abbreviations-acronyms-readability-activity-7034201322761408512-Duyl

#SelfEditing #readers #Bookstodon

@JennaMPink

I will write scenes and chapter summaries by hand. I like that I can work on my writing and not be on the computer all the time. When I go back to type it up, I have a much better idea of what I want to say.

#AmWriting #selfediting #books

A new blog about the editing guide I'm publishing at the beginning of the new year: https://lzedits.com/2022/12/21/a-workbook-for-writers/

#selfediting #fiction #writers #indie #editing #advice

#selfediting #lifelonglearning #FridayPhoto📸