Ideas for Tightening up Your Manuscript - Tips for Authors
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Self-editing is probably my least favorite of all the writing tasks, but it, along with the other proofreading and revising steps, are the most important to your manuscript. Here are some ideas of ways to tighten your work and make it more polished before you send out queries. You often only get one shot with an agent or publisher, so your manuscript needs to be the best it possibly can.
Read the dialogue out loud. If you don’t want to be the reader, use the “Read Aloud” function on Microsoft Word’s Review tab. You will often hear things that need to be adjusted.
Look at your dialog. Make sure it moves your story forward. Remove the chitchat if it doesn’t add to the story. Fluffy filler needs to go.
Review your dialog tags (he said/she said). Use the Goldilocks method. You need what’s just right (not too many and not too few). The reader needs to know who the speaker is, but every line doesn’t need a tag.
Look for places where the action is mundane. If you are bored, your readers will be too.
Print out a copy of your manuscript and read it chapter by chapter. You will see more mistakes on paper than you will on the screen.
Use your spell checker to catch extra spaces and typos.
Search for “be” verbs (is/was/were…). Try to substitute a stronger verb. These are usually parts where you’re doing a lot of telling and not showing.
Look for examples of passive voice and make those sentences active.
Review long paragraphs and make sure all the detail adds to your story. Backstory (your character’s history) is important, but it needs to be sprinkled in. Long chucks of history read like a police report or a data dump. They take the reader out of the story’s action.
Look at the action in your story. You do not need to describe every single step and thing that your characters encounter. If your story is about your character flying to Europe, you really don’t need to tell us about all the things she does to get to the airport unless it is key to the work.
Make a list of your overused words We all have our favorites. Mine are “just” and “that.” During my editing, I search for these and replace or delete as many as I can.
Pay attention to the details. If you rename or change something, make sure you’ve removed or updated all references. I beta-read a few chapters for someone the other day, and this person had two different names for the main character and two different spellings of one of the names.
To me, editing is harder than writing, but it is so important to the overall project. What else would you add to my list?
