Have a free day and want to sharpen up your book?
There are lots of quick ways to improve your manuscript. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the empire could definitely fix up a few statues in between sunrises.
Here’s our list of easy, fast editing tips:
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Editing can take up a lot of time, so take a page from corporate America and outsource. If you’re having trouble with a specific passage, ask for feedback on from friends, family members, or other writers. By investing a couple of minutes to craft an email asking for help, you could get an hour’s worth of help with your book in return.
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Search your manuscript for these filler words and phrases, then delete them. You’ll be surprised how much more concise your writing can be when you cut out unnecessary words.
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We all have our favorite words. You know the ones, worming their way through your prose, cropping up unconsciously in everything from poetry to thank-you letters. You might love the word “impossibly” or “ribcage”, but if you use any word too often, you deflate its power. By using a word or phrase frequency counter, you can quickly ferret out your overactive pieces of diction and replace them with something fresher. For more on “crutch words”, check out this blog post.
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We’ve already talked about the dangers of over-relying on adverbs in this post, but if you don’t have time to go through your whole book again looking for offending parts of speech, search your work for the letters “ly”: the letters that adverbs generally, predominantly, commonly end with.
If you’re really feeling daring, try deleting every adverb you find, and see how that affects your prose.
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It’s more time-efficient to cut out passages than to add to them. Editor Max Perkins was notorious for his liberal cuts of novels, most notably hacking down Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homewards, Angel by nearly 90,000 words.
Today, be Max Perkins. Try cutting out the very first ten pages of your novel. Does your story fall apart? If so, you may have too much exposition too early on. Does it still make perfect sense? If so, you may find that your introduction is unnecessary. You can also try this exercise on a smaller scale, working with the first few paragraphs of a chapter or even the first lines of a scene.
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One common struggle writers have is creating believable, intriguing dialogue. If you want to figure out where your characters’ conversations need the most work, recruit a friend and have them read a few scenes with you, speaking only the characters’ lines and ignoring the narration. If it sounds like a conversation you could have in real life, congratulations! The screenwriters will have no trouble making the movie adaptation of your hit novel. If the dialogue sounds forced, this exercise will at least clue you in to which parts need the most retooling.
Do you have any other favorite quick fixes for your work? Let us know in the comments!
