Five “Easy” fixes for your manuscript

Most people don’t have a bundle to spend on proofreaders, copyeditors or editors to help them get their manuscript into shape. They/We depend on friends, family and critique partners and groups to help us with the bulk of that type of work before possibly moving on to hiring someone else to take their manuscript a step further.

In the meantime, here are a few tips to help you when going through your own work. I called them “Easy”, but revising is rarely “easy”. It’s hard work. In theory, these are simple tasks that will help you see your manuscript from an objective point of view (part of what you’re paying for when getting an editor or proofreader). In practice, however, once you get into your manuscript, like anything else, it will be a lot of work.

1) WAIT: Be willing to let your baby sit for a good long time before going back to it. Wait as long as you can – a couple of weeks, a month, more if possible. If you’re a typical writer, you are bound to have more than one thing going at a time, so start a new novel or work on that anthology of short stories you’ve been meaning to put together. But leave your manuscript alone for a good bit of time. Do not reread it obsessively. Put it away. Then, after you have almost completely forgotten about it, you can pull it out to reread, revise and rework
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2) RED PEN METHOD: Print out your manuscript and sit down with a red pen and go through it page by page backwards. Our eye catches things on the printed page that it misses on the computer screen. Also, your brain fills in for you when words are missing or incorrect, especially when you’ve been working with a manuscript for a long time. When you read things out of order, it can’t do that. It takes work, but you will find many little errors this way.

3) FIND FUNCTION or F5: If working at the computer screen, spend an hour or two (or an evening) with the Find function. Many writers tend to over use words or write passively when first getting their stories out on the page. Make a list of words you know are either a) overused by you or b) passive or filler words such as “just” or “would” or “was” or “that” or “had been” or “have had”, etc. Then, use the F5 button or Control F and look for all those words. Read the sentence or paragraph where they appear and decide if you really need that specific word there. Most of the time you don’t. Of course it depends on if the words are in the narrative or the dialogue. We tend to be conditional when speaking to other people, especially if we’re tentative in character. For example, in a narrative it might be better if you changed say “Peter was feeling” to “Peter felt” but if Peter is opening his heart to a good friend or lover in dialogue, he might be more tentative and say “I was feeling” rather than “I felt.” For the most part, however, you will find that you don’t need many of those words. The pace of the narrative will pick up after taking out all the extra words and probably you’ll have done a good bit to make your characters more specific because you’ve taken a second look at how they might say something.

4) MORE F5: Another way to use the F5 or Control F function is when you know you have a nomenclature (name) issue (such as changing character or place names, etc.), or if you realize you’ve been consistently misspelling something or referring to it incorrectly. Sometimes we lose track of where we referred to all these different characters, places and things when we change them around. The Find function is also very important then. Don’t just hit Find and Replace, though. Like above, take the evening and go through each instance one by one to make sure you want to change what you think you want to change.

5) CHANGE PERSPECTIVE: If you are having a hard time getting a handle on a character or storyline, try rewriting a bit of it from a different point of view. Open a completely blank document and if your manuscript is in first person, rewrite a scene in third person. If it is in third person, try reversing that into first person. Or, try telling the story from another character’s point of view. You may decide after that exercise to rewrite your entire manuscript from another point of view, which is a pain, but I can attest that it is well worth the effort. (And again, you will end up using the Find function a bunch to change many of the pronouns.) Or, you may decide to keep your manuscript as is, but it will give you an insight into another way to write the scene or give you a better grasp of the character.

I hope some of these tips help others out there who are working on their own manuscripts. These are tips I use myself that have helped me when trying to take a second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) look at my own manuscripts.

For a much more indepth look at how to do a layered edit, then I suggest reading through this article by Devon Ellington on WOW! Women on Writing.