A lot of people ask me how to go about making edits to a book once they have finally finished it or whether indeed they even need to do any editing if it is going to an editors.
Firstly, yes! Yes, you must absolutely edit what you have written. If it is a full novel put it down for a few days, come back to it with new eyes and edit it like you were getting paid per mistake found! If you don't actually have a bachelor's degree in English, journalism or communication here is a quick checklist of things to look out for when editing your book.
Firstly, everyone has specific words and phrases that (which?) always cause them to (too?) second-guess whether (weather?) they’re (their?) using them correctly. If you know what your (you’re?) troubling words are, use your word processor’s search function to locate every possible variant of that word or phrase. Take the time to learn the correct usage.
Run a spell check
Seems simple advice but it is easy to forget. Not all the squiggly lines are going to be giving the right advice for the sentence you want to write but 9 times out 10 they will.
Remove all double spaces at the end of sentences
I know that tapping two spaces following your full stop is an age-old habit ingrained into you since before the dawn of modern digital typography, but it is no longer the done thing. If you can't get out of this habit conduct a find-and-replace search after you’re done writing. Type two spaces in “find” and one space in “replace” and hit enter. Voila!
Avoid throat-clearing.
This is a literary term for a story or a chapter that finally begins after a page or two of scene setting and background. The reader will be bored to tears, if it is essential to the story find some way to incorporate it into the flow.
Don't be grandiose.
If you get tempted to show off your vocabulary or a fancy turn of phrase, think reader-first and keep your content king. Don’t intrude. Get out of the way of your message. The average reader does not want to have to have a dictionary with them just to figure out what is going on.
Omit needless words.
A rule that follows its own advice. This should be the hallmark of every writer.
Avoid subtle redundancies.
“She nodded her head in agreement.” Those last four words could be deleted. What else would she nod but her head? And when she nods, we need not be told she’s in agreement...unless you are in India.
“He clapped his hands.” Unless you're talking about Thor, what else would he clap?
“She shrugged her shoulders.” What else?
“He blinked his eyes.” Same question.
“They heard the sound of a train whistle.” "The sound of" can be deleted.
Avoid the words "up" and "down"
…unless they’re really needed. He rigged [up] the device. She sat [down] on the couch - Not needed.
Usually delete the word that.
Use it only for clarity.
Give the reader some credit.
Once you have established something, you don’t need to keep repeating it.
for example: “They walked through the open door and sat down across from each other in chairs.”
Unless they are ghosts, if they walked in and sat, we can assume the door was open. Are they in zero gravity? of course the direction was down, and—unless told otherwise—there were chairs. So you can write: “They walked in and sat across from each other.”
Avoid telling what’s not happening.
Chaucer is pretty much the last great author to get away this...
“He didn’t respond.”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“The crowded room never got quiet.”
If you don’t say these things happened, we’ll assume they didn’t.
Avoid being an adjectival maniac.
Good writing is a thing of strong nouns and verbs, not adjectives. Use them sparingly.
Novelist and editor Sol Stein says one plus one equals one-half (1+1=1/2), meaning the power of your words is diminished by not picking just the better one. “He proved a scrappy, active fighter,” is more powerful if you settle on the stronger of those two adjectives. Less is more. Which would you choose?
Avoid hedging verbs…
…like smiled slightly, almost laughed, frowned a bit, etc.
Literally, avoid the term literally—when you mean figuratively.
“I literally died when I heard that.” R.I.P.
“My eyes literally fell out of my head.” There’s a story I’d like to read.
“I was literally climbing the walls.” You have a future in horror films.
Avoid too much stage direction.
You don’t need to tell every action of every character in each scene, what they’re doing with each hand, etc. Let your reader use their imagination for that.
Keep the same Point of View (POV) for every scene.
Failing to do so is one of the most common errors beginning writers make. Amateurs often defend themselves against this criticism by citing classics by famous authors who violated this. Times change. Readers’ tastes change. This is the rule for today, and it’s true of what sells.
Avoid clichés.
And not just words and phrases. There are also clichéd situations, like starting your story with the main character waking to an alarm clock; having a character describe herself while looking in a full-length mirror; having future love interests literally bump into each other upon first meeting, etc.
Show, don’t tell - Resist the urge to explain (RUE).
Marian was mad. She pounded the table. “George, you’re going to drive me crazy,” she said, angrily. If Marian pounds the table and chooses those words, we don’t need to be told she’s mad.
“You can do it!” George encouragingly said. If George says she can do it, we know he was encouraging.
Avoid mannerisms of attribution.
People say things; they don’t wheeze, gasp, sigh, laugh, grunt, snort, reply, retort, exclaim, or declare them.
John dropped onto the couch. “I’m beat.”
Not: John was exhausted. He dropped onto the couch and exclaimed tiredly, “I’m beat.”
“I hate you,” Jill said, narrowing her eyes.
Not: “I hate you,” Jill blurted ferociously.
Sometimes people whisper or shout or mumble, but let your choice of words imply whether they are grumbling, etc. If it’s important that they sigh or laugh, separate the action from the dialogue:
Jim sighed. “I just can’t take any more,” he said. [Usually you can even drop the attribution he said if you have described his action first. We know who’s speaking.]
Avoid mannerisms of punctuation, typestyles, and sizes.
“He…was…DEAD!” doesn’t make a character any more dramatically expired than “He was dead.”
All done! Now print it out and do it all again with a pen and paper. When that is done get someone to read it out loud or get the computers text to speech feature to do it for you. Nothing shows the faults in the flow better than this.
Now you are ready to send it to your editor.
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