ed·it
verb
prepare (written material) for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it.
Perhaps you see where this blog post is going?
I had a lot of excitement during July on my adventures with PandaMania’s Bamboo Book Time, but there’s a darker side to my July. I went hardcore on editing my newest novel, He’s Going to Kill You.
Coming up with ideas and developing them into a narrative comes natural to me. Self‑Publishing a book is actually pretty easy. What isn’t so simple is publishing a well‑polished book without the backing of a traditional publisher. It requires a great deal of self‑editing. You can't see me right now, but I shuddered when I typed self-editing.
When I went to write my first novel, I knew I couldn’t afford all the stages of editing. It’s expensive. So I did a great deal of research to figure out what happens in each stage of editing and developed a self‑editing guide for me to use with my projects.
Based on my research, I consider there to be three primary stages of editing:
Developmental / Structural Editing
Copy/Line Editing
Proofreading
We'll not discuss all those stages today, but rather focus on a specific one that's recently troubled me. For the month of July, you could say I was in the Copy Editing stage. Since I’m a one dude show, I’ve purchased editing software to assist me in being objective with my works. It’s called ProWritingAid (aka PWA), and I recommend the free version to everyone. I use a paid version, but I wouldn’t need all the bells and whistles if I wasn’t writing books.
I enjoy most of the writing process, but going through reports in PWA is by far the most painful part of my process. Unfortunately, it can’t be skipped, because it makes significant improvements to my writing.
So what’s painful about editing? You'll find out. Let's look at the four main reports I use in PWA.
The first report is a general goals list. It’s the simple part. It helps identify complicated sentences, excess adverbs, strange dialogue tags, and some other snazzy stuff. These changes aren’t too bad and rarely take long.
The second report is for identifying overused words. This provides a medium amount of pain. I think we all have go-to words we don’t recognize until some software points them out to us. For example, I found I used the word “moment” too much.
Some examples: I’ll fix it in a moment. She was stuck in the moment. Moments passed before the zebra answered the phone.
It’s a go-to word for me, but with the use of a handy thesaurus, I can fix the problem.
Some fixes: I’ll fix it in a minute. She was stuck in the instance. Seconds passed before the zebra answered the phone.
The overused words check helps identify these go-to words.
The third report is the bane of my authorship. PWA calls it an Echoes check. It’s like the overuse report, but instead of overuse, it identifies repeated words in proximity. This provides a great deal of pain. It’s so easy-to-use words like “it” in proximity. So far I’ve used it multiple times in this paragraph and the Echoes report will flag them for sure. Fixing these issues is a stout mix of thesaurus use and rewriting sentences. In the end, this forces me to improve my writing and be more creative. But d***, it’s the most pain I’ve felt all year.
The fourth report is my favorite. It’s a list of improvements, including grammar and spelling issues, tense problems, etc. PWA makes this easy with clickable suggestions to fix most of the issues. This provides no pain.
Together, these reports assist me with covering the same issues that a copy/line editor would cover if I could afford to hire one. There’s a good chance this would still be a painful process even if I hired an editor. It’s also worth noting that there are many other reports PWA provides. The software is amazing.
Fortunately, I’m on the other side of all this with He’s Going to Kill You. Still, it leaves a man with scars.
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