To my mind one of the hardest parts of novel writing comes
after you have typed those two magic words, ‘The End’.
That’s when the editing starts and it is a long, trying
road. I don’t know how others tackle it but my method is to put the story aside
for a day or two. Once the euphoria of finishing has dissipated I go back to it
and go through the whole thing looking for the helpful hints that Microsoft
Word has given me. The red underlining indicating spelling errors is easy to
fix, you either add the word to the dictionary or spell it correctly. Green
underlining is harder to fix, sure I make grammatical errors, but if they
appear in dialogue I sometimes leave them in because people do not always speak
grammatically and I want my characters dialogue to be real.
Once the easy fixes are done I then read the story through,
looking for obvious errors. That usually takes several days and when it’s done
I copy the whole thing to a flash drive and hand it over to my very able editor
who will go through it suggesting insertions and deletions, pointing out bits
that don’t make sense, ‘Britishisms’ (that’s things we Brits say that make no
sense in a trans-Atlantic context) and continuity.
My editor is good, very good and I usually get the file back
with all sorts of helpful suggestions and comments. That’s when the hard work
starts again. I go through each one, seeing if it works for me and fits the
story. Almost invariably I accept about 90% of the suggestions and make the
appropriate changes.
Then the story goes on hold for at least a week, sometimes
two or three before I do my final read through. By this time I’ve read my own
story so many times I can almost recite it so this last read through has to be
done very carefully otherwise I may inadvertently miss something.
After that the story is done and ready for the publisher. It’s
still not perfect though. No matter how many times I re-read my own work I
always find something I would change if I could. I guess when striving for
perfection none of us are ever satisfied.
Stop Press! Innocent? the fourth novel in the Dean and Steph
series is now available on Amazon. Check it out at:
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