Editing Steps

The day will come when you're finished with your book. You might video tape yourself as you write the last line.

Now what?

This is the hardest part in the writing process; editing.

We all want to produce works of art, but in reality writers are craftsmen, not artists. We're simply willing to work harder than the competition.

Here are ten steps to editing. I learned these from listening to Bob Hostetler from a conference.

1) Ask yourself, and you should've been asking this all along, who cares? Who is going to be changed by reading your work? If you don't have that nailed down already, it's important to do so now.

2) Look for personal flaws. We all have them. Mine personally is using words that are spelled right but not right in context. Like "metal" and "medal."

3) Use the spell check on your computer.

4) Read your work aloud. A lot of people cheat on this, but you'd be surprised what results you get when you do this. I tried it a little while ago and found problems in the first sentence.

5) Wait at least 3 days before editing. When you first write your material, you're very protective of it. It's impossible to edit when you've just written it. You'll read what you wanted to say, not what you wrote.

6) Delete all unnecessary words. For instance, "He fell down." Take out the word "down." Is there any other direction to fall?

7) High all verbs and make them stronger. Make them active by removing all "to-be verbs" like Was, Were, Are, Is and so on.

8) Highlight all the adverbs and adjectives and bend over backwards to eliminate them. In general, we all use these too much. Let nouns and strong verbs do the work.

9) Get rid of cliches in all forms. We've all heard "clean as a whistle," or read the scene where the person gets up in the morning.

10) Finally, scan your work for varrying snytax (sentence length and structure). You don't want all your sentences to be short, or all long. It would sound like someone beating a drum in the person's mind instead of symphany lulling them into the writer's world.

I hope this helsp! Hostetler also had other great stuff. His book, The Bone Box, is coming out soon.