Writing tips – How to self-edit your novel

I’ll start this post by making the assumption you agree that the first draft of a novel is not the one that ought to be published. Every book needs to go through several stages of revision and correction. I’ll talk about the method I have refined as I’ve written more and more novels. I hope it gives you some ideas.

Writers should know how to edit, even if the common advice is to hire someone to review your book. That’s simply not an option for many writers, so if you’re going to do it yourself, adopt a reliable process for fixing mistakes and ensuring the book is an entertaining read. Be aware that there are several types of editing.

A developmental edit checks for consistency. It looks for plot holes, accidental changes of name, point-of-view mix-ups, continuity errors and anything else of that nature. Obvious mistakes found at this stage must be fixed before refinements are made. There’s no point in checking grammar if the story is disjointed.

A line edit follows. Think of this as working out how to enliven the prose and polish the story. Better word choice, variation in sentence length and other stylistic improvements should be considered. The focus then shifts to copy-editing. This looks at finer detail such as grammar and punctuation. A proofread comes last.

If you hire an editor, bear in mind the steps described above are discrete and thus incur separate fees. You have to be clear where you are with your story and what you need the editor for. An author who relies too much on an editor is not ready to publish a book. Writing and editing are skills which have to be learned.

But let’s continue with the theme of this post: doing it yourself. Allow me to throw in one last note of caution. Just because you can self-edit does not mean you should. You need to be comfortable and confident with your writing, have an eye for accuracy, and the determination to put in the effort.

We therefore need a way to incorporate the editing steps into a workflow once the first draft of the story is written. The word draft is used by authors to describe the versions of a manuscript. The link between drafts and edits is flexible. You might think of each draft as an edit, or write multiple drafts before editing.

Either way, what we are really describing here is a process of refinement. The terminology of drafting and editing can get a bit muddy – it doesn’t actually matter what you call it as long as you’re covering all the steps – but it might be useful to offer a better term that describes the revision stages of a manuscript.

Emendation is the process of making corrections and improvements in a document. I think it’s an apt term for what we are endeavouring to achieve, so I use emend as a broad synonym for drafting and editing. It’s sensible to save each version as a separate file. Always back up your files to another drive or card.

I’ve never written a book without knowing the plot first, and I’ve always made notes. Over time I’ve become more thorough with my planning, and I now hand-write short chapter plans after sketching out the outline. That way I have a complete story structure, but it’s not so precise that I can’t tweak it if an idea emerges.

I outline for two reasons. I see no point in starting a story without knowing if it’s worth telling. My time is precious and I don’t want to abandon an incomplete or weak project. (See Jeffrey Deaver’s thoughts on plotting.) The other reason is because I want my first draft to be as close as possible to the finished book.

Many authors write a quick and loose first draft just to get the story down. The second draft becomes a rewrite. I can’t use that method, so I strive for detail early on in order to save work later. Planning and writing this way reduces the errors a developmental edit would otherwise have to fix. I write in Word.

My second draft is created by using the Save As command and altering the file name. This is where I begin emending. I’m focussed mostly on brightening up the prose and trimming verbiage. I keep an eye open for word repetition. I try to catch mistakes at this stage but don’t worry unduly. This is essentially a line edit.

Never feel dispirited at having to go back to the first page and revise your work. I really enjoy this stage because it is the chance to polish the story that I thought I wrote in the first draft. I expect to look over what I originally typed and find it rather flat. By the time I finish the second draft, I feel it’s taking shape.

Even though a great deal of effort goes into the second draft, I spend far less time on it than on the first one. This would not be possible if I improvised rather than plotted. If I were to estimate how my writing time is divided, I’d say it’s about 80% on the first draft, 10% on the second, 5% on the third and 5% on the fourth.

Remember, I’m emending, not rewriting. So, once the second draft is done, I prepare a third and focus more critically on editing. The story is in good health by this point, so it’s appropriate to look closer at the detail. It’s at this stage I use a tool called ProWritingAid to help find mistakes and make stylistic improvements.

I need to make an important point here. Good self-editing cannot be done solely by reading the manuscript in the hope of spotting errors and clumsy writing. Word’s grammar checker is of limited use. It’s necessary to use a specialised grammar tool. ProWritingAid seems to be the preferred application of authors.

PWA integrates with Word, so you can use it while you write. The software is available on lifetime licence or subscription. But it is very expensive and, as an author, you probably won’t use most of its extensive suite of tools. Look for a discount code or wait for a Black Friday sale. This Kindlepreneur article is worth a read.

It is my third draft which gets the PWA treatment. I usually highlight a couple of pages and then run the application’s Grammar & Style report. I rarely use the other tools in the suite when emending. Areas for review are shown beside the text. I find this useful for identifying sentences which could be simplified.

The software is prone to finding false positives, so don’t accept changes without reviewing them carefully. And some of its offerings are plain wrong or weird. It suggested that I replace did better with welled, and pursuing with pursuiting. It can’t tell the contextual difference between apostrophes and quote marks.

It’s also obsessed with separating clauses with commas. This might now be considered a rule, but it isn’t necessary a lot of the time and can be ungainly. Commas must be used intuitively in creative writing. When PWA replaces or adds apostrophes and speech marks, it does so with straight ones instead of curly ones.

Grammar software can only follow its built-in rules, but the number of errors ProWritingAid makes is not insignificant. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be without it, even though I use few of its tools. I might only use it twice a year, but it’s a key part of my emending method, and I always accept a fair number of its hints.

I’ll say one more thing about using an application like ProWritingAid or its competitors. They seem to operate on a principle of reductive and simplistic language. That’s good in terms of clarity, but creative writing can be weakened by bland prose. Never let a computer program diminish your writing voice.

Once I’ve run my novel’s third draft through ProWritingAid, I’m confident the sentence structure is good and the punctuation errors have been caught. I won’t make any big changes thereafter. But there’s a strong chance mistakes linger in the document. The purpose of the fourth draft is to find and kill the rascals.

The last stage is to hear the manuscript being read aloud. This is necessary because certain mistakes will be invisible. Don’t read it yourself because you’ll see only what you think you’ve typed, not what’s actually on the page. The safest way to do this is to get Word to read the document with its Speak tool.

This is, however, only available on Windows. (MacOS users can set up a screen reader called Speech.) In Word, add an icon for Speak by clicking the arrow for the Customize Quick Access Toolbar options. Select More Commands > All Commands > Speak > Add > OK. This tool is the secret sauce of book editing.

The trick with Speak is to highlight and listen to roughly half a page at a time. (It will fall silent abruptly if you’ve selected too much text.) The voice will read some text in an unexpected way. Unusual words will be pronounced oddly. But it’s great at catching wrong words that you’ve read over and over but not spotted.

In THE FILE, for example, I wrote the word scrapped when I meant scraped. ProWritingAid didn’t spot a correctly spelled word in the wrong context, and my eyes missed it every time I read the paragraph. Listening to a computer voice recite the text is the only sure way to catch mistakes like that one.

So my fourth draft is a proofread done by the computer. The Speak tool is invaluable. Just highlight a few paragraphs, listen to the voice and read along. You can pause the playback when you hear a mistake, correct it and then listen to the passage again. It will help you rid your manuscript of hard-to-see errors.

Later versions of Word have a Read Aloud tool built into the Review tab. It’s a slightly more sophisticated tool than Speak, but Speak is probably better for proofreading because it only reads selected text. You have to stay a little more involved with the process when using Speak, and that must be a good thing.

My fourth draft is my final draft. I might find the odd sentence which I feel needs to be altered, but at this stage I’m mostly listening for, and correcting, those invisible mistakes. An error-free manuscript is, in my opinion, only achievable when a combination of emendation techniques are used. Okay, that’s about it!

To summarise: 1) Handwritten outline and chapter sketches. 2) First draft to get the story down as creatively as possible. 3) Second draft to improve the vividness of the story and spot mistakes. 4) Third draft to use ProWritingAid for grammar and style checks. 5) Fourth draft to use Speak to listen for invisible errors.