10 Self-Editing Tips for Fiction Writers

Editing’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. The best person, though, to edit a manuscript or article or blog post is the author herself. Sure, writers can—and should, when necessary—hire a professional copyeditor to go through and correct a manuscript before it is sent off to an agent or book designer in preparation for self-publishing. But the writer knows her material better than anyone else, so she’s the best person for the job.

You might be scratching your head right now asking, “Is there a method to self-editing?” Well, maybe not just one method, but there are easy and helpful tips that authors can follow to make the process less confusing or painful. Learning to self-edit is a lesson in awareness. It’s all about understanding what common mistakes writers make and how to fix those mistakes.

Writers should want to improve their writing, right? But if you’re a writer whose time is precious, you won’t want to spend hours studying grammar books or memorizing comma rules. On the other hand, you don’t want to waste time struggling over sentences that would be quick and easy to fix if you knew the rules. So it might behoove you to learn some, if only to have more time to spend with your family or baking or whatever it is you’d rather be doing.

The “self-editing rules” are myriad, but if you just start with these ten easy but essential ones, you’ll be on your way to improved writing, a cleaner draft, and a vanishing headache.

1. Read aloud what you wrote. Or have your computer read to you using a software program. You’ll catch clunky sentences, missing and repetitive words, and misspellings.
2. Search and destroy weasel words. Weasel words are the words you throw in out of habit. Often they are pesky adverbs like very and just. Or phrases like began to or started to. Make a list of your most common offenders, then search for those words and see if you can take them out without altering your intended meaning.
3. Trim down sentences. Take a look at each sentence and see how many words you can cut out that you don’t need. Often a phrase of three or more words can be rewritten with only one. Less is more—and almost always better.
4. Give it a rest. Leave your writing alone for a while—an hour, a day, a week. Pick it up again when your brain is rested. Pay attention to what jumps out at you as awkward. Trust that feeling. It’s almost always right.
5. You need commas. Check to make sure you put commas before direct address in dialog. There’s a big difference between “Let’s eat Dad” and “Let’s eat, Dad.” Speaker tags always use commas: John said, “I hate grammar.” Don’t be deceived into thinking little bits of punctuation really don’t matter. They do. You don’t want characters eating other characters unintentionally, right? Unless you’re writing about zombies.
6. Do overdo the punctuation. Writers sometimes use excessive punctuation. Don’t use a lot of exclamation marks to tell the reader something is important, or pair them with question marks. Let the context and word choice show the importance of the line.
7. Pay attention to verb conjugations. If you write “I lied on the couch after the man drug me across the floor” your reader might think you’re writing some weird espionage novel. The most mutilated verbs are lay, sink, drag, swim, and shine.
8. Ditch the extraneous speaker and narrative tags when writing dialog. Be aware that if the reader knows who is speaking, you don’t need to tell them over and over—especially in a scene with only two characters. And know that flowery verbs stick out, such as quizzed, extrapolated, exclaimed, and interjected. Just use said and asked, and maybe an occasional replied or answered.
9. Avoid passive construction. Especially starting sentences with “it was” and “there were.” Just what is “it”? Usually the meaning is vague. “It was hot today” can be replace with “the sun baked his shoulders,” which paints a clearer picture. Think: strong nouns and verbs.
10. Check those tenses. All too often writers shift into past tense when writing present tense, or vice versa. Even more common is the use of the wrong past tense. “I was sleeping badly for a week” might need to be written “I had been sleeping badly for a week.” If the action was a continuous one for a time in the past, you need that had.

Self-editing doesn’t have to be all that hard or painful, and the more you apply yourself to learning the “rules,” the easier it gets. Take pride in your writing by learning ways to improve your self-editing technique.

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