There are interesting thoughts, and feelings, that come out of the fact that you get to read through your own novel. I happen to struggle a bit to sit down and read a physical book, or screen. My go-to happens to be having it read to me, there happen to be quite a few applications you can use to do that.
Technically, this inspired me to try to go through my backed up books in reading a book a month, though it isn’t what we will focus on today. There are a few steps that you can use for your second edit. It really helps to go through your entire novel.
Step 1: Things You Missed
This first step happens to speak for itself. It is easy to understand when you miss a few things in your plot. Technically, I added a single chapter that has a crucial role in the plot. I went from roughly 50,500 words after the first edit to a rough 52,900. This took me around an hour, which bodes well for this year’s NaNoWriMo.
The important thing to note is I tried my best to pay attention to the things that I share in the next steps. I feel that slowly, but surely, my writing style is getting slightly better.
“Let’s just go sit in the lounge to make ourselves comfy for a while now. That will definitely help us right now,” Jean shares as she wipes sweat off of her forehead.
Accidental Distances: A New Chapter’s Paragraph
Step 2: Spelling Errors
The most amusing error in the draft I went through was very simple spelling errors. When you have the novel read to you it will definitely show for you. Imagine that, I see afterward it happens to be in 6 places, you accidentally wrote “suite” instead of “suit”? It can shed a lot of light on the novel you happened to write.
It is important to make sure you have things in the correct spelling for your story. Some places it won’t necessarily be a word that isn’t correctly spelled. It could be just that you use similarly spelled words by accident.
This is just an adjustment in fixing simple mistakes that might be difficult to find.
Step 3: And, And
Going through it I happened to see several flaws that needed addressing. I keep sticking to adding the word “and”. It doesn’t feel like anything less, as a story, when the “and” is minimized in it. I personally prefer to have less in my novel.
As is after Steps 1 and 2, we aren’t expecting to remove absolutely every “and”, we just find 830 results. Some are dialogue, some I may not be able to remove, it is just something I should look at for myself. I want to enjoy my own novel’s story, I just happen to dislike too many.
This got down to 615 by the time I had to delay finishing this in order to have this week’s post here. This step will be continued by me, it also leads me to choose step 4 has to be done as soon as I finish it.
Step 4: Tenses
I accidentally made a large portion of the novel swap between past, present, and future tenses. I will not be able to say more on it yet because I haven’t started this step yet. I will be compiling a list of past tense words for myself, go through and edit them all to fit the actual present tense needed. The future tense will be a little slower, it is just because of the fact that sometimes we discuss what will happen in the future.
The Last Words
Apologies for this short post, it is simply to share the ideas around
It is quite an interesting job to adjust the entire novel in good ways. I am definitely enjoying it more, I just need to consider more of this when I write the second book. Similarly, it is making me debate actually writing the second book this NaNoWriMo, then actually connecting the two, directly, for a single novel. I am just not sure anymore.
