My next stage of editing (First novel)

TulipMama

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Hi all,

I'm starting to get anxious as I go through my first ever novel length edit. I'm using Pro-Writing Aid to find adverbs, long sentences, overused words, echos, cliches, spelling and grammar issues. As I'm going through I'm starting to pick them out more on my own before the software, but I'm happy to let the computer point things out since it speeds things along quite a bit.

My question though is, what should I do next? I'm 3/4 of the way through this computer-aided edit and have no clue what to do afterwards. The program isn't going to catch everything, or I'm going to ignore some of the edits I don't like despite being very much wrong. I'm a mechanical engineer, math is my best friend and secret lover. Grammar is the mean guy in the corner office that spits in my lunch while staring me in the eye.

I think the story is structured in a way that makes sense and flows from point to point. After futzing with the program it'll be as polished grammatically as I can get it under my own steam. I don't have any Beta-readers and I'm *checks post count* a distance from begging for one on this site.

Should I try to hire an Editor? See if I can bribe friends and family into reading it with my patented triple chocolate brownies? Burn the book and the world that led to it coming into existence?

I'm looking forward to any input.


Tulip Mama <3
 

lizmonster

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When I started revising my first book, someone here recommended Holly Lisle's one-pass revision method. I found some of her techniques incredibly useful, but I will say I didn't revise in one pass. :) Still - her emphasis on clearly understanding the themes and character arcs you are trying to get across has stuck with me. She may have something there that can help you.

On friends and family as readers: by all means, ask them, if you'd like. :) But friends and family don't make the best betas. In fact, it's been my experience that finding good betas takes a fair amount of trial and error. Ask here once you have the posts - but even then, be prepared to find you're not always going to be well-matched, even with a willing reader.

On hiring an editor: as a general rule, it's considered unnecessary if you're looking to trade publish, but I've talked to a number of people who've learned a lot from professional editors. IMHO the goal should be to learn how to edit your own work to a high standard. Trust your gut on whether hiring an editor at this point would be helpful with that.
 

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Hi all,

I'm starting to get anxious as I go through my first ever novel length edit. I'm using Pro-Writing Aid to find adverbs, long sentences, overused words, echos, cliches, spelling and grammar issues. As I'm going through I'm starting to pick them out more on my own before the software, but I'm happy to let the computer point things out since it speeds things along quite a bit.

My question though is, what should I do next? I'm 3/4 of the way through this computer-aided edit and have no clue what to do afterwards. The program isn't going to catch everything, or I'm going to ignore some of the edits I don't like despite being very much wrong. I'm a mechanical engineer, math is my best friend and secret lover. Grammar is the mean guy in the corner office that spits in my lunch while staring me in the eye.

I think the story is structured in a way that makes sense and flows from point to point. After futzing with the program it'll be as polished grammatically as I can get it under my own steam. I don't have any Beta-readers and I'm *checks post count* a distance from begging for one on this site.

Should I try to hire an Editor? See if I can bribe friends and family into reading it with my patented triple chocolate brownies? Burn the book and the world that led to it coming into existence?

I'm looking forward to any input.


Tulip Mama <3

Hey there.

I was an academic in molecular biology and related fields until a few years ago and now write fiction. So your questions are very familiar to me.

I've never used Pro Writing Aid or Grammarly, in part because some of the grammatical errors are intentional and so on, and I'd rather learn the stuff organically besides. Adverbs are fine--better than fine--in the right spot and with the right choice. Pick up your favorite book--you'll find an adverb pretty quickly, even if it's a Stephen King novel. You just don't want tons of them.

An engineer in our writing group has dyslexia and once he started using one of those programs his writing got much, much easier to read--so the programs are great. I just don't like the idea. Perhaps some day I will.

A few thoughts about what else to look for as you edit; things the programs might not analyze:

EMOTION. Again, pick up your favorite book. Read a single page (about 300 words) and see how many clues you can find to emotion, either the protagonist's or the other people, or even the setting. (The sea was angry that night.) Count them. Flip to another page and repeat. As a reference, it's said that The Da Vinci Code averages four emotions per page.

Now look at three hundred words of your writing. Is there any emotion in it? Any clues about emotional 'setting' to the reader?

AGENCY. Is your protagonist acting toward something in every scene? Is there an antagonist of some sort making things hard for the protagonist?

SCENE STRUCTURE. I like this idea. Really dissect your story at the scene level. Related: can you trim sentences off the front and back of each scene and maintain structure? This gets into pacing.

STAKES. What will your protagonist lose if they fail to reach their goal? is it clear to the reader?

READ. And ask if you are engaged as you read, and as you do so make mental notes about what the author did to engage you. These notes can be silly (e.g. I realized giving one of my tertiary characters some sports gear, off page--'he's out in his catamaran' or the like--would make him pop) or more robust (I've been accumulating a list of the different qualities of sentence types that can beef up weak narrative) and everything between and more.

There are a thousand things to look for, though. White space (avoid talking heads), sufficient description executed well, voice, tags, tension, escalation, and so on.

You might need more than one editing pass. Be warned. Then again, you might not. To me, the idea is not to go through a checklist, although using a checklist at any particular stage might be useful. If the first draft equates to framing a house, the second might be getting the wiring installed properly. Third draft might be dry wall and windows. Fourth draft, counters and fixtures.

Even at that stage, no one wants to move in. You still need to paint, furnish, do the landscaping out front.

Preplanning (before the first draft) perhaps equated to pouring the foundation.

I asked an agent/acquisitions gal last week if querying authors should hire an editor to be more competitive and her answer was YES. The vibe from her was that an agent wants something that could go straight to submissions and acquisitions, not a single typo or error in the entire manuscript. The advice left me puzzled, because I know plenty of cases where agents help authors prepare their manuscript for submission, but there you have it. I hired editors and found them helpful, but they were pricey and they were NOT a solution to make the novel sell--they were simply professionals each with their own strengths.
 
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TulipMama

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When I started revising my first book, someone here recommended Holly Lisle's one-pass revision method. I found some of her techniques incredibly useful, but I will say I didn't revise in one pass. :) Still - her emphasis on clearly understanding the themes and character arcs you are trying to get across has stuck with me. She may have something there that can help you.

Thanks for the link! I'll have to do a second pass at this point, obvi, but I'll be looking for different things. I've been trying to nail down my themes and character arcs. They're in there, but they wandered in without me noticing and now I have to figure them out, then maybe make them plainer.

On friends and family as readers: by all means, ask them, if you'd like. :) But friends and family don't make the best betas. In fact, it's been my experience that finding good betas takes a fair amount of trial and error. Ask here once you have the posts - but even then, be prepared to find you're not always going to be well-matched, even with a willing reader.

I honestly wan't planning to subject my friends or family to my book. I'm hopelessly in love with the concept and will chatter indecently about my magic system, or how my MC would attack a dinner conversation, but I don't think any of my standard confidants even like my genre, nor would they be likely to give me the criticism I'm looking for. I'll ask, but not expect.

On hiring an editor: as a general rule, it's considered unnecessary if you're looking to trade publish, but I've talked to a number of people who've learned a lot from professional editors. IMHO the goal should be to learn how to edit your own work to a high standard. Trust your gut on whether hiring an editor at this point would be helpful with that.

I'm glad to hear that -.- I'm a father of 3 with a house and stay at home wife, the extra expense of an editor was a lingering spectre I didn't want to focus too intently on. I suppose I'll aim to learn what I can about editing outside of grammar and such. I may feel like it's good on the story/character front, but I've got a 95,000 word blind spot for my book.



Hey there.

I was an academic in molecular biology and related fields until a few years ago and now write fiction. So your questions are very familiar to me.

I've never used Pro Writing Aid or Grammarly, in part because some of the grammatical errors are intentional and so on, and I'd rather learn the stuff organically besides. Adverbs are fine--better than fine--in the right spot and with the right choice. Pick up your favorite book--you'll find an adverb pretty quickly, even if it's a Stephen King novel. You just don't want tons of them.

I'm writing first person, so yes, I keep some grammar and spelling errors in there. She says 'Me am smort' at one point when she does something right dumb. I also like adverbs, but I wrote the thing before I learned adverbs were a spice and not a staple food. My aim is to only keep them in there when they're fun or necessary.

An engineer in our writing group has dyslexia and once he started using one of those programs his writing got much, much easier to read--so the programs are great. I just don't like the idea. Perhaps some day I will.

Not dislexic, just kinda dumb re: language

A few thoughts about what else to look for as you edit; things the programs might not analyze:

EMOTION. Again, pick up your favorite book. Read a single page (about 300 words) and see how many clues you can find to emotion, either the protagonist's or the other people, or even the setting. (The sea was angry that night.) Count them. Flip to another page and repeat. As a reference, it's said that The Da Vinci Code averages four emotions per page.

Now look at three hundred words of your writing. Is there any emotion in it? Any clues about emotional 'setting' to the reader?

I LOVE using emotion as adjectives, or implying anger/sadness/glee etc through physical tells or sarcasm. I try not to let the editor bugger up my style or change the feel of a sentence, but it helps me not use the same word six times in a paragraph.

AGENCY. Is your protagonist acting toward something in every scene? Is there an antagonist of some sort making things hard for the protagonist?

I think so, it's a murder mystery and she's pretty keen to get to the bottom of the case. She takes exactly one break, where her romantic interlude leads into a fight with demons, so I'm pretty sure we have forward momentum.

SCENE STRUCTURE. I like this idea. Really dissect your story at the scene level. Related: can you trim sentences off the front and back of each scene and maintain structure? This gets into pacing.

I'll look into this. I'm doing my edits chapter by chapter, which have between 2-5 scenes each. That should be manageable for my second pass.

STAKES. What will your protagonist lose if they fail to reach their goal? is it clear to the reader?

Hmm, that's a good question. She's a police detective, so the stakes are implicit in her job title. It gets more personal as the book goes on, but the stakes never really amp up beyond that until Chp 20. Is that too late (out of 29 chapters)?

READ. And ask if you are engaged as you read, and as you do so make mental notes about what the author did to engage you. These notes can be silly (e.g. I realized giving one of my tertiary characters some sports gear, off page--'he's out in his catamaran' or the like--would make him pop) or more robust (I've been accumulating a list of the different qualities of sentence types that can beef up weak narrative) and everything between and more.

As mentioned, three kids. I don't have reading time. I listen to audio books, but it doesn't leave much room to take notes outside of mental ones, which don't always survive to make it to paper. I'd be interested to hear some of your take-aways though, if you're willing to share of course ^.^

There are a thousand things to look for, though. White space (avoid talking heads), sufficient description executed well, voice, tags, tension, escalation, and so on.

You might need more than one editing pass. Be warned. Then again, you might not. To me, the idea is not to go through a checklist, although using a checklist at any particular stage might be useful. If the first draft equates to framing a house, the second might be getting the wiring installed properly. Third draft might be dry wall and windows. Fourth draft, counters and fixtures.

Even at that stage, no one wants to move in. You still need to paint, furnish, do the landscaping out front.

Preplanning (before the first draft) perhaps equated to pouring the foundation.

Ugh, nobody told me writing would be hard!

I asked an agent/acquisitions gal last week if querying authors should hire an editor to be more competitive and her answer was YES. The vibe from her was that an agent wants something that could go straight to submissions and acquisitions, not a single typo or error in the entire manuscript. The advice left me puzzled, because I know plenty of cases where agents help authors prepare their manuscript for submission, but there you have it. I hired editors and found them helpful, but they were pricey and they were NOT a solution to make the novel sell--they were simply professionals each with their own strengths.

That makes sense, agents probably have to mill through dozens of books a day looking for a good one. They've got quotas to make like everybody else, I'd be tickled pink if a project came across my desk with fully drafted, checked and stamped drawings for me to give a thumbs up to. I've heard of agents who sit and act as a semi-editor too, but I figure that's for stories that really catch their eye and show a lot of promise despite the editorial short-comings. I'm going to assume my novel isn't one of those for now.

Maybe after a couple more passes and a beta-reader or two, I'll see about an editor. From this I've definitely concluded it's not my NEXT step, so progress?

Thanks a lot for the input! I'll try and learn/implement the points you've brought up!


Tulip Mama <3
 

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I asked an agent/acquisitions gal last week if querying authors should hire an editor to be more competitive and her answer was YES. The vibe from her was that an agent wants something that could go straight to submissions and acquisitions, not a single typo or error in the entire manuscript. The advice left me puzzled, because I know plenty of cases where agents help authors prepare their manuscript for submission, but there you have it.

There are a lot of agents with different preferences.

I will say all the agents I've spoken to at any length have been, to some extent or another, editorial, but I feel like that's kind of a risky thing to say, and can sometimes incline less experienced writers to query something they should be polishing a little more.

Because the truth is agents absolutely want to see a scrupulously polished manuscript. It's just that some of them can read a book and think "yeah...almost," and depending on the value of "almost" they'll either sign you (after talking with you about how much you're willing to change, and making sure you're on the same page), or offer an R&R, to see if you can push that "almost" a little closer.

Some of this is my own personal bias. I love skilled outside feedback, even though getting it terrifies me. At its best, it helps me hone my skills and makes me better at getting the vision in my head onto the page. It's like finding a brand-new color in the crayon set: it lets you push your art just a little bit further than you thought you could.

ETA: Yes, I expect there are plenty of agents who want books they can place without edits, and it's good to understand if that's the sort of agent you're looking for.
 
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Hi Liz.

Part of the reason it puzzled me is because some groups of writers aren't able to pay for an editor. So to suggest that you need it to be competitive raises the idea of privilege, in my mind, but ... it's a business? You make a very good point about knowing who you are pitching to.

Separately, I saw a blog a day or two ago where someone commented that the old standard of slush ... being generally horrific ... no longer applied. Slush, they said, is actually comprised of decent writing these days. Maybe those programs Tulip Mama mentioned, as well as communities like this, have helped shift the quality up.

Tulip Mama: When it comes to improving your personal craft, I'd say you definitely want to make time to read at least a little. As a note, it can be as little as a page, from anywhere in any book (probably within your genre). The point is not to read for enjoyment, or to analyze the whole story in some big book-report way, although that's important too I guess, but to read for tips and tools. Basically, if we were to apply the house-building analogy again, every professional contractor (author) is putting their toolkit, rolodex, cheat sheets, and so on, on full display for you. Right there, in their published fiction. And you're free to take any of those tools for a spin.

Here's a link to a page somewhere in the middle of Dan Brown's Inferno.

From that alone, and regardless of anyone's particular opinion about the author, though I devoured one of Brown's books fifteen years ago, I could say about this piece of fiction:

1. Adverbs are evidently OK.
2. Exclamation points are also apparently OK.
3. Effective verbs and adjectives for this passage are loaded with threat: Bolted, rumbled, lethal, black, lean and strong.
4. He's using very short paragraphs here. Why? (to up the pace and tension.)

etc.

Does any of that apply to my project? Not all of it for sure; I'm in a different genre and use a different voice. But, it shows me some of Dan Brown's toolkit. And it was a good reminder to me to avoid simple (weak) verbs. Brown doesn't use a single one in that half-page, and he manages at least two emotions--I always come up short on emotions in my writing. He's got a kick-ass tool in his kit (emotion, emotion, emotion) that I want.

Were I to do the same exercise with The Vampire Lestat, which I've been referring to lately for its lush prose and description, I'd see a different toolkit.

There are about a dozen books on my nightstand. I pick them at random as I'm nodding off, flip through them, like window-shopping, seeing what I want to try in my own work. One of the things I notice, for example, is that description should have a directionality to it. Big to small, or small to big.

The air was hot and moist. (big) She was overheating. (medium) If she were alone, she'd strip off her top. (more intimate.)

That sort of thing.

I'd say to try it with whatever fiction is lying around your home.
 
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Part of the reason it puzzled me is because some groups of writers aren't able to pay for an editor. So to suggest that you need it to be competitive raises the idea of privilege, in my mind, but ... it's a business? You make a very good point about knowing who you are pitching to.

The idea of hiring an editor or not, to me, has more to do with the skills you need to have a multi-book career. As you point out, editors are expensive. If you're going to sell multiple books - and IMO that includes self-publishing multiple books - you need to learn to self-edit.

As for the expense of being a writer? Yeah, that's a thing. Writing as a career is inherently classist, which is a rant I can save for another thread. :)

You give excellent advice on learning to edit. My own advice would be:

1) Read. A lot. Doesn't have to be "classics," but read at least some books that have been professionally edited. IME there's nothing better for your writing than cultivating an instinctive sense of what works (and what doesn't).

2) Maybe don't worry so much about how many adverbs you're allowed to use. :) While I hang on to a set of generally-agreed-upon rules of grammar, I try not to do much self-censoring on word choice. When I revise, I'll often recognize words that disrupt the flow, but sometimes you need those "never use" constructs to make the flow of the language work. Prose and poetry are kind of the same thing. It's reading that'll help you internalize when it is and isn't appropriate to use an adverb in your own work.
 
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Yes, please, do read — it is the best thing you can do for yourself as a writer. You say you don’t have time, but you have found time to write and now to revise a whole novel. I encourage you to take a third of the time you now spend on writing, and spend it instead on reading. It will make your writing better. It will make your editing better. It will expose you to the tools writers use to create atmosphere, emotion, character, tension, suspense. It will give you ideas.

(And by the way, audiobooks count. You can listen and think about what you are hearing, think about how the words fit together, think about the devices the author is using. Just as you can look up from a page to think about such things, you can pause an audiobook to think about them. You can learn just as much from reading with your ears as you can from reading with your eyes.)

:e2coffee:
 
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TulipMama

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Thanks for the advice. I have made a new policy for myself while at home that basically goes: If I have a spare second I'd usually check my phone, grab a book. I've surprised myself by getting 1/4 of the way through Keeper of Light and Dust in just a couple days. I'm going to have to hit up a local book store soon to see what I can grab to bolster my bookshelves with. I'm loathe to admit it, but I don't have a very impressive library at home, I've been telling myself I don't have time to curl up with a book for years. Reading the first couple chapters felt like running after a long, sedentary lifestyle, my reading muscles were sore and my joints ached, but it felt good :)

The added bonus being that if my kids see me with my nose in a book instead of my phone, maybe they'll get the hint that reading is fun and not a chore I assign them before bedtime -.-

The first thing I've noticed is that hard and fast rules don't exist for prose or word choice, which I sort of knew, but listening to you fine advisors coupled with the first dozen chapters has really driven home. I've felt a little guilty keeping some of my word-choices when the editing program told me not to.

For now I'll finish my grammar/cliche/echos editing with my writing program, then move on to making sure every scene is worth the words I've given them. I think in future edits I'll do it the other way around -.-

Also, I audiobook all day long. When I'm cooking for the family, building my deck, driving, mowing the lawn, making some tea, I've got my headphones in one ear feeding me stories. It actually became a bit of a problem since I'd do it at work and my performance suffered since I still need that focus on 'mindless' tasks. My wife still hates that I listen to them so much, says it makes me harder to talk to when she wants my attention. Right now I'm listening to 'The Hallows' series by Kim Harrison. She does info-trickle pretty well. I knew I was in an urban fantasy pretty well off the hop, but didn't explain why until Chp 3 or 4. I think I'll try and emulate that to a degree.

Anyway, thanks again!

Tulip Mama <3