Leslie Stonebraker

The following self-editing strategies can be applied to all genres, fiction or non-fiction. There are tons of great resources from other editors and writers out there; I encourage you to search for more!

See your work anew

• Read your work aloud, or have someone read it to you. You’ll be amazed what you catch.
• Reformat your document: Change the font. Change the margins. Convert it to a PDF. Format it like an actual book. Print it out. A simple visual change can jar your brain out of its patterns.
• Transcribe tough sections, either by hand or into a new document. The act of retyping or writing your words over again will make you interrogate each one.
• Write absurd versions of something that isn’t working. If you can find the tone you’re trying to strike using ridiculous language that doesn’t fit in your book, it can help you specifically identify where you’re trying to go.
• Rewrite from memory. Take a paragraph or section and do this three or four times in a row, fast. What do you learn? What new connections did you make?
• Change the point of view. What does this scene look like through another character’s eyes? What if it was in second person? Third? First?

Make the narrator/character & setting sing

• Character/narrator intros. The first time we meet someone (character or narrator), we need to get a sense of who they are. What they look like, what they sound like, what they’re wearing. We don’t need to know about every mole on their skin, but we do need to know how they fit into the world around them.
• Emotionality. Humans are complex, contradictory creatures. While narrators and characters must to be comprehensible to a reader, they should still be complicated and three-dimensional.
• Understand your characters Everyone has an origin story. Be curious about your narrator and characters. Examine them with empathy. If there is a character or action you cannot understand, that piece of your story may lack depth, be unbelievable to readers, or contain a plot-hole.
• Interiority. Can we see inside your character or narrator’s head? This is especially important when something impactful and dramatic is happening.
• Agency. Your narrator and characters must be in control of some pieces of the story, even in a plot-driven work. Give them agency, and find out what they do with it.
• Secondary characters shouldn’t be camera hogs. If their backstory/goals/needs are overwhelming your main characters, then they may belong in their own book.
• Consider the point of view. How close is your narrator to your character(s) in any given scene or chapter? If that distance is short or nonexistent, then the work must be in that character’s voice with thoughts authentic to that character. With the exception of first person nonfiction, anything that smacks of an “author” at the desk will pull a reader from your story, and feel like over-explaining. Conversely, if your distance is too great, your character(s) will be inaccessible and distant to your reader.

Identify your structure & narrative arc

• Make an outline. Detail what happens in each chapter, and to whom. I love Allison K. Williams’s take on Brevity.
• What are the dominos? How does one chapter/scene lead into the next? How does what happened before influence what is happening now?
• Are there layers? Each scene and chapter should be an onion: what’s happening on the surface, what’s happening below the surface, and what’s actually happening at the core.
• Are you starting in the right spot? What makes this day different than all the other days that came before, and launches your narrator/character into the next 75-125K words?
• Is your chapter 1 actually a prologue? If the events in your first chapter set up your story, but don’t actually launch the contents of your book, then you’ve written a prologue. Question whether that information is best placed at the beginning of the book, or if it should be held in reserve for a dramatic reveal later on.
• What comes after your climax? These scenes and chapters are here because they must be here. The character/narrator can only have these experiences/thoughts/feelings/resolutions because they have completed the journey of the book. If a post-climax chapter could be moved earlier in the book without consequence, it doesn’t belong at the end of your story.
• What is the reader “holding”? You tell the reader about a juicy family secret. “Here, hold this secret,” you say to them, “It will be important later.” Have you followed through? A reader’s trust is earned by remembering what you’ve asked them to “hold” and making that intrigue pay off.

Grammar should grammar

• Verb tense: Are you in the present? Past? Simple? Continuous? Perfect? When you’re changing tenses, are you also changing time? Have you telegraphed that time jump to the reader?
• Passive voice. Is your subject subjecting, and your object objecting? Or is your object receiving the action of your subject? Use of passive voice should be deliberate, not accidental.
• To be verbs: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been. Do a search for every instance of these words and consider each. Is there a stronger way to phrase that sentence?
• Comma splices, aka run-on sentences. I’m as guilty as the next author of getting wrapped up in my own words, the artistry I’m weaving, the beauty of the language, my similes, my metaphors. The danger of asking a reader to run a marathon in a sentence is that they may tire before they get to the meaning.
• Sentence fragments. Should be purposeful. Not accidental.
• Word frequency. Check the document as a whole (have you used the word “fantabulous” a hundred times?) and individual sentences (The fisherman shouldn’t fish for fish when the man in the lure-speckled bucket hat can toss a line into the lake, hoping to catch some trout.)

Don’t forget the formatting

• Standardize formatting choices like use of italics, quotes for dialogue, internal dialogue, text messages, etc.
• Keep a style sheet that for any formatting decisions, as well as character names, nicknames and who gets to use them, foreign words, deliberate misspellings, and the like.
• Make a timeline of everything encompassed in your book (including memory and backstory). Check any mentions of dates, ages, holidays, “current events” and the like against this timeline.