Editing your book (Beginning Writer)

I'm an ESL (English as a second language) teacher.  I always teach grammar, check over papers that need a lot of work and help students with writing.  Thus, when I sat down to edit my first book, I was surprised to see that I had made so many mistakes.  Though, remembering my time as a student, maybe I shouldn't have been soooo surprised.

I'll start with a brief summary for those of you that don't want to read the whole post.


1)  Read this blog post http://www.karenafox.com/commonmistakes.htm

2)  Don't repeat yourself.  Most of the times this means using the same word, you can right click the word to get some synonyms.  I also found that I would write whole paragraphs that said similar things and thus deleted a paragraph or two.

3)  Add dialogue

4)  Make sure you use the right names, i.e. sometimes I would write Wolf instead of Wing.

5)  Read over everything you wrote and do it OUTLOUD.  Listening to the words helps me catch mistakes.

6)  Put it aside for a month or so then read it OUTLOUD all over again.  I believe Stephen King suggested this in his book On Writing, though it's been a while since I read it. 

7)  Everyone makes mistakes so don't worry.  You can even make revisions after you publish your e-book.  I may have done this after my mother told me a few things about what she read.  :)

8)  Enjoy yourself and love what you write.  This is one of the most important things.



So, I started my editing by reading over what I wrote at various times during my writing.  I would print out my book, put it in a folder and then read silently on the subway, bus, or at home.  This helped me think of my story and catch some mistakes, but it's not the best way to edit.  The best way is reading outloud.

After I had finished writing I went to google and typed in beginning writer mistakes.  I wish I had done this when I had started because the website it took me to was very helpful.  It was a blog posting from an author named Karen Fox. 

http://www.karenafox.com/commonmistakes.htm

After reading this post I went back and editied again, this time reading outloud.  I caught more mistakes and had a better understanding why I didn't like some parts of my story.  I even found myself x-ing out whole paragraphs.  I highly recommend that every new and old writer read her blog post. 

So, after reading through my whole book, OUTLOUD, I waited for a month and then read through it again.  This gave me some time to relax my mind and, when I came back, I was fresh and could catch more mistakes.  Here's a pick of most of my edited pages.  Fun stuff!

 

 

And here's a pick of the editing I did yesterday on book number two.  154 pages (A4 not ebook) done so far.