7 Tips to Help You Self-Edit Your Novel

You wrote a novel! Now what? NaNoWriMo’s “Now What?” Months are here—this January and February, we’ll be helping you guide your novel through the revision and publishing process. Today, author Derek Murphy shares a few of his favorite editing tips to help you strengthen your writing:

Before you put your NaNoWriMo novel out into the world, you’re going to need to clean it up. Probably, a lot. Typos, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes are inexcusable for writers, and yet very common. Everybody makes mistakes.

A great editor will always make things better, but they won’t change or rewrite the story for you. They may identify crucial plot holes or character development problems, but they won’t fix them. 

Even if you can’t afford a professional editor, it almost never hurts to have another pair of eyes look over your manuscript. But before you hand your writing to anyone else to read, you should clean it up as best you can, and know that readers will forgive a lot if you can hold their interest with a great story. The following seven tips relate to trends I’ve noticed among new writers. Use them like a checklist and you’ll be able to strengthen your writing.

1. Build conflict and sympathy first.

Your book needs conflict, and your main character has to be sympathetic from the beginning. We need to root for, pity, and bond with the main character, and hate and loathe the opposition. There must be a villain, or a source of conflict, or a foil – somebody who for some reason makes the protagonist feel bad. The protagonist should doubt him/herself, so that through the story they can gain self-confidence and existential security. No matter how cool the action scenes are, if we don’t know who to root for, if we don’t feel an emotional connection to the outcome, we just don’t care. Before I know which characters are good or evil, when they’re all strangers to me, I wouldn’t care if any of them got hit by a bus–which means I’m not invested in your story. Before you can blow things up and have epic shoot-outs, readers need to know, love, and care about your protagonist.  

2. Start with the action.

Almost all scenes/chapters need to start in the middle of the action. Cut out all the lead up stuff. Cut out the explanation, back story, exposition and description of the scene. Start in the middle of a tense dialogue. Start with an attention-hooking line. Start with close-up, focused, zoom-in of drops of blood, sweat, and tears. Hook attention first–then back up, fill in the details, slow down, and set up the next major conflict.  

3. Believable characters don’t flip-flop between extreme emotions.

Usually, people laugh when they’re happy. They’re short-tempered and snarky when they are angry. But they rarely “sob hysterically”, “shriek uncontrollably”, or “shake visibly.” People don’t typically let their emotions run wild–especially around a big group of other people. And they don’t often flip-flop between intensely elated and deathly depressed at every minor catastrophe. In fact, people usually don’t react at all when bad things happen–they are in shock. The emotions sink in when they have time to process their grief. So check how often your main character (or any characters) cry, sob, scream, shriek, etc. Experiment with how to portray intense emotional reactions in a subtler way. 

4. Know your grammar.

It’s the easy stuff we tend to miss: It’s/Its, There/Their/They’re, etc. Even if we can spell big words correctly backwards, you’re going to mess the simple stuff up. Use the search/find feature to search for these kinds of simple homophones one by one and check them all. If you notice something else you screwed up, search for it–you probably did it more than once. Also, we tend to have ‘bad batches’–so if you find any errors, super-edit that section, because there are likely to be more errors nearby.  

5. Watch out for adverbs.

Adverbs are bad. They are lazy writing. Anytime you express what someone did and how they did it by adding an -ly (”said excitedly”, “left resolvedly”, “prayed devoutly”, etc.) you’re missing the chance to write well and picking something easy. A lot of these phrases will be meaningless (like “laughed happily”). Or they will be confusing. So use your search/find button for “ly” and track them all down. Does it need to be there? Is there another way you can show how they did something without using an adverb? 

“Said excitedly” = “said, a grin spreading at the corners of his mouth and his body quivering with expectation.” 

“Left resolvedly” = “stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.” 

Seriously: search every one and try to get rid of them all. 

Edit: Ok, not all. Some adverbs are acceptable. But get rid of the really bad ones that don’t mean anything. Be aware of the tendency to use them poorly, so that when you do decide to use them, you use them well and they improve your writing.  

6. Be sparing with exclamations.

Now use the find/replace feature to search for “!” and “?!”. This ties into the extreme emotion flip-flopping: most people in everyday life don’t shout or exclaim at every unexpected thing. That means you hardly ever need to use exclamation points. I’ve seen a lot of indie authors have characters saying things like “How dare you!!!” or “Are you crazy?!?!” Lots of punctuation is no substitute for good writing. Not only is it unnecessary, it’s often used to mask over weak dialogue–so searching for your “!” can indicate poor dialogue that you need to strengthen.  

7. Make the narrator’s language fit the scene.

Unless you’re writing a first-person narrative, the narrator should be invisible. So when you use big, strange, fancy, or unusual words, it interrupts the action and draws attention to the narrator. This especially happens with repetition: a novel I read recently used “purchase” in the sense of “to gain traction.” The first time I thought it was a bit odd. By the third time, it had really distracted me from the narrative of the story. You are likely to have favorite words that you like to use, but when you pick a fancy word instead of a common word, it will stand out. Characters themselves can use them in dialogue, but you don’t need to use them. 

A cool online tool you can use to check the frequency of all the words you used in your book is Textalyzer.net. Just paste all your text there and look at the most common words, to see if you have any bad habits you should break.  

Read the full article and 26 more self-editing tips on www.creativindie.com.

Derek Murphy has a PhD in Literature, and was a book editor before specializing in making books beautiful. He’s been self-publishing since 2004, and helps indie authors sell more books through a variety of tools, resources and platforms.

Top photo by Flickr user Caleb Roenigk.