How to Edit Your Own Book, Part 2

​Today I’m going to finish talking about how to edit your own book. In Part 1 of this double post, I covered critiques and rewriting. In this second part, I’ll finish with getting a second critique and reading your book aloud.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​So, you’ve rewritten your entire book. What is your next step?
 
STEP THREE – Get it critiqued again. If you haven’t gotten it critiqued before, this can be your first critique. If you have before, what I personally like to do is send the book back to my first three critiquers and send it to two new critiquers so that I can hear both whether I fixed the problems for the original critiquers and whether the new critiquers see anything fresh, because their eyes will be fresher. This works a lot better if the rewrite-and-edit process has taken you a year rather than if it’s taken you three months and your critiquers are like, “We just spent ages reading this. We don’t want to read it again.” So choose your audience carefully on whether you should actually be asking this of people and whether these people are willing to do it—and whether, when the time comes, you will do it for them in return. But if you can manage it, send it back to be critiqued a second time. Again, make sure these critiquers are discerning readers whom you trust.
 
Now that you’ve gotten their critiques back, you can choose either to rewrite the entire book again, which is a very good practice—I believe always in rewriting books; I think it always makes for better-written books in the end. But I do understand it can be extremely time-consuming, and if you are in a time crunch, and if there aren’t major problems that require big developmental changes, you can skip this step and go directly on to the step after this, which is:
 
STEP FOUR – Reading aloud your book. Now, by “reading aloud your book,” I don’t mean speed reading, and I don’t mean half reading, half skimming, half mumbling to yourself. I mean read it properly; read it as if you were an audiobook reader. I have a friend I read aloud to. She loves being read aloud to and I love reading aloud, and we like similar books. And so I will read aloud to her, and she’s quite an expressive listener, so she will laugh or gasp or occasionally make comments, but she’s not constantly interrupting me. For the most part, she’s just listening attentively while doing some mundane task that doesn’t take any brainpower. It’s really helpful to have an expressive listener like this because it’s like you are hearing what they’re hearing. So if they’re gasping in all the right places and laughing in all the right places, then you know that you are correctly communicating in your book what you want to communicate. But if they laugh when they really shouldn’t be laughing . . . ask them why they laughed and then fix it.
 
And yes, that totally happened to me. I was 21 or 22 at the time. I was reading aloud The Monsters of Stephen Enchanter to this friend, and I said the word “gore” as in entrails. (It’s a sort of violent book.) Anyway, I used the word “gore” and she laughed. I asked why, and she said, “The word ‘gore’ is funny.” And I realized the word “gore” is sort of . . . “funny” is not exactly the word for it, but it’s a bit of a cheap word in some ways—which can be purposeful and it can be used very effectively in situations that are meant to be funny, but this was a serious action scene and, um, no. I needed to fix it, so I did, and that was really useful.
 
That being said, if you can’t find anyone to read aloud to, read aloud to your computer or to the wall, or if you’re really hardcore, record an audiobook of it. Because an audiobook will force you to go over again and again and again every single little sentence so that you can no longer deny when something doesn’t read right.
 
Reading your book aloud will allow you to do several things. First, if you’re reading aloud to someone, you can hear their reaction in real time. Second, you are incorporating more senses, so you’re hearing as well as seeing a sentence, and that allows you to better figure out whether it flows properly—we’re in the copy-editing stage now—whether it flows properly and whether it seems natural and is easy to read. And it will also allow you to make a series of what you might call Freudian slips. In other words, you read a sentence slightly differently from how it’s written. Maybe you do or do not use a contraction, or you use a slightly different word. When you do this, for the most part, pay attention, because there’s a good likelihood that you’re reading it in a way that is more natural than the way it’s written. And unless it’s causing a lot of redundancies within the text to do it this way, it’s a good idea to change it.
 
Finally, reading aloud will better allow you to catch redundancies, especially in specific overused expressions or words. There’s a concept here that I like to call “invisible words,” and I previously did a blog post on it. Invisible words are words that are so frequent and so largely void of meaning that we tend to not see them when we read or write; we tend to overlook them as if they’re invisible. These are words like “all,” “just,” “even,” “of course,” and “well,” but also sometimes descriptions. One of the most vastly overused words is “smile.” People are always smiling, or grinning, and descriptions are constantly using people’s eyes. But you don’t need this level of repetition; you don’t need to be saying “very,” “even,” “just,” “of course,” and “well” every other sentence. And even though it’s invisible, it will weigh down your story.
 
Here’s what I like to do: Before I read aloud, I’ll start with a frequency check using Microsoft Word, the Find panel on the side, CTRL-F, not the Find and Replace dialogue box. Because CTRL-F on the side will highlight every iteration of the word so you can see how often you’ve actually used it, and then you can go through and delete all the ones you don’t need. Now, if you don’t know what the invisible words are that you personally overuse, because every writer’s a little different, you can ask someone, and you can look at my list of invisible words, because that will give you some common ones.
 
But you can also use a frequency counter. There are free online programs that will allow you to copy and paste your novel in and that will list by frequency the most common words that appear in your story. On top you’ll have “a” and “the” and “of” and “on” and so on, but if you have “right” very far up, you probably overuse the word “right” because that shouldn’t be a sufficiently frequent word that you have used it five hundred times in your five-hundred-page novel. That’s too often. On the other hand, frequency counters aren’t that helpful when it comes to more noticeable, non-invisible words that are overused. I was recently looking at a manuscript that used the word “frequently” twice in two paragraphs, and then only three other times in the entire book. When we’re writing, our brains get to thinking certain words and so we’ll tend to use them close together. And the word “frequently” can definitely be used three times in a manuscript—that’s fine. But it can’t be used twice in two paragraphs, and when you are reading aloud, that tends to be easier to catch.
 
Similarly, overused expressions or descriptions can be easier to catch while reading aloud. I once read a book—a book I love, actually—in which characters’ lips were always quirking. I mean, that’s a great description, but it happened a lot. I read another book that had the word “little” on almost every single page. “Little” is a fairly frequently overused word.
 
Additionally, there are certain words that should only be used once in a manuscript. These are very uncommon words, words that will jump out at a reader because they don’t see them very often. I have two examples of this, both from books I like. One is from, I believe, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, one of Dickens’ books. It uses the word “appellation,” as in the name someone is called. I’d never heard that word before, and so I looked it up and found the Latin root and remembered it, so when he used it a second time, I noticed it. Of course, in Dickens’ day, that might not have been considered weird. On the other hand, we have a more modern book, Diana Wynne Jones’s The Lives of Christopher Chant, in which she uses the word “bumptious” twice. “Bumptious” is not a word you see very often, and again, I had never come across it before. And so I looked it up (it means “arrogant”) and then she used it a second time, and it was really noticeable to me because it was such an unfamiliar word. So that’s another thing to keep an eye out for.
 
Finally, overused descriptions. I mentioned “smile” and “eyes” before, but each writer has some fairly unique ones. I sometimes overuse “licking lips.” You can do it two, maybe three times in a manuscript—I had it in there about seven times. If you’re not sure what to replace these with, look up emotion thesauruses. They basically tell you things like what are the physical signs of being angry. Now, you can demo this for yourself—you can go look in the mirror and pretend to be really angry and note what you’re doing. Hands are claws, shoulders are tense, face is scrunched, lips are set in a line, narrowed eyes, maybe a more gravelly or aggressive tone of voice. You can figure it out for yourself, but if you have a character who’s very different from you or a situation you’re unfamiliar with, an emotion thesaurus will give you a list of different physical manifestations of different emotions.
 
So, you’re reading your book aloud at least once—it’s great if you can do it more than that. This is your copy-editing technique, and I find it highly effective for both copy editing and as much proofreading as you as a writer can do. If you need to make any changes, you can always repeat any of these steps again. Otherwise, your book is probably ready to go to a professional proofreader to get a final once-over.
 
I hope that you found this post useful. Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about how to edit your own book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

As an Amazon associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Deborah J. Natelson

Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.