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?