Hello, my adoring Gidsciples! It is I, Gideon U. Eklund; bringing you delicious written treats, like a creepy ice cream man who only comes at night, and doesn’t have any pricing on the side of his van, but if you ask nicely, may give you a free sample and stare at you creepily while you consume it. Would you like a free sample? Why, of course you would; now climb on in the back here, where I keep the delicious written treats.
I have been camped out up here on the ol’ Golden Pedestal, working—nay, slaving—over a hot laptop for a while now, to get my first manuscript cleaned up, trimmed down, and query-ready. I’ve finally reached a point where I feel like I can do no more to it. Now it’s ready for me to send to publishers who will reject it outright, or love it and suggest massive ways in which I can do more to it, and it starts all over again.
…Whee.
Having finally completed it, I find myself with a few thoughts I’d like to share with you; straight from me—your favorite, super-popular, High-Brow Book Scientist (Patent pending.) Here are my thoughts in no particular order:
- “Find and Replace” is your friend: and like any good friend, you need to use it as much as you can. I found the “Find and Replace” tool invaluable to my revisions. A quick CTRL+F on most typing programs will get you going with some version of it.
- Fix your formatting: I’ve spoken to you before about how formatting is important. (Back in my second post, with seven tips for you. Go read it if you haven’t.) I had discovered—to my utter self-loathing—that I had been improperly using the “tab” key on all my indentation for all of my work, and that I now had to go back and remove them all, and replace them with automatic indentation instead. (This is to help the people reading it, because it may look completely wrong on their end when they download or look at your submitted work.)
This was a nightmare of a prospect; and it was about as much fun to fix as it sounds. Fortunately, if you use that handy “find and replace” function, and search for “\t” (on the program I use, at least,) you can find all of those tab strokes, and remove them.
That being said, it’s a bigger pain in the ass to go back and fix bad formatting than it is to get it right the first time around. There’s a handy link in my other post, but I’ll put it here, too:
https://thewritelife.com/how-to-format-a-book/
Seriously—use that link, get your formatting right, and understand now that you probably have gotten it wrong somewhere anyway. Just keep cool, and don’t let it crush your soul.
- Ditch your adverbs and dialogue tags: While you’re doing the ol’ CTRL+F two-step, start off by doing a search for the letters “ly” right off the bat. You’ll find a lot of adverbs, I’m sure, and many of them are probably attached to dialogue tags. (He said, she said, and lines like that are dialogue tags, for those of you who don’t know.)
Some of them may be necessary, but I’m willing to bet most aren’t. A lot of my dialogue had adverbs I could cut, and in a lot of ways, it improved my writing by forcing me to write better dialogue which demonstrated the adverb I was cutting. Here’s a particularly clichéd line of dialogue I just made up to use as an example:
Dirk McAction slammed the book down on the table. “I’m not following your rules anymore!” he said angrily. “I’m going to do this my way!”
A lot of writers think they need dialogue tags and adverbs in places they don’t; myself included. In this example, Dirk already seems angry from the dialogue, punctuation, and his obviously psychotic lack of respect for books; we don’t need to be told that anger is the emotion in play here. If he doesn’t seem angry without the adverb, try changing the line to something that expresses the right emotion without having to tell us what it is. Let’s change it up a little:
Dirk slammed the book down. “Screw your rules! I’m doing this my way!”
See how that gets right to the point? Now, if you go back and re-read the first version, you’ll see that it reads a lot clunkier than the cleaned up revised version; we already understand the mood just from the dialogue, so we didn’t need the “he said angrily” part at all. Also, if the reader is already aware that Dirk is speaking the line, you don’t need any of the dialogue tags or adjectives connecting the two pieces of dialogue at all.
Author’s Note: Any character spouting a hammy line of dialogue like that is probably a tough-as-nails cop who plays by his own rules, and therefore, other people’s rules are unnecessary. Kind of like a drunken little league coach arguing with an umpire; but with more guns, topless women, and chase scenes involved—unless you’re coaching little league the way I do, that is.
Important follow-up note: I was recently asked to step down from coaching little league in my spare time.
- Shorten it up, and get to the point: This is something a lot of writers need to work on, and it may not be evident during that first draft.
You’ll notice, when I fixed Dirk McAction’s brilliantly crafted original line of clichéd dialogue, that I shortened it up a lot. We didn’t need his last name, we didn’t need to know he’s the one who spoke, or that he slammed the book down onto a table, specifically. (Unless there was a more logical place to slam it in the room and he just… didn’t do that?) In any case, you will find a lot of places while you’re re-reading and revising your work to pull out extraneous details.
Check to see if you arerepetitive, saying the same thing multiple times, or rephrasing things too muchbeing redundant. If you are describing me as “handsome, like a golden god; a beautiful specimen of humanity, who looks really, really good,” you are A.) correct, and B.) repeating yourself. Pull most of that stuff out, and simply describe me as “resplendent.” Don’t be afraid to ditch a few of those extraunnecessary, extraneous, multiplewords.
Author’s Note: You may need to get a thesaurus, if you don’t have one already, to look up all the different words to describe how attractive I am. I’m pretty sure you can stick with “resplendent,” though.
- “Very” and “That” may turn out to be two of your greatest foes: There’s an old piece of advice which says, “If you feel the urge of ‘very’ coming on, just write the word, ‘damn,’ in the place of ‘very.’ The editor will strike out the word, ‘damn,’ and you will have a good sentence.”
See how important the CTRL+F function is proving to be? Take a look at any sentence with “very” or “that” in it. If you pull them out, does the sentence still make sense? If it does, then leave it out. Alternately, if you pull it out and it doesn’t make sense, can the sentence be changed (shortened maybe, hmm?) so that it makes sense without it? If so, do it—those two are a tricky little dynamic duo of bloat words you really don’t need.
Not all instances of “very,” “that,” or other bloat words need to go, however. If the word serves a purpose, keep it!
- You will be re-reading your own work (which you are already familiar with,) A LOT, and it will get BORING: One of my hardest challenges while tightening up my manuscript was that I had to go back and re-read the whole thing again, more than once. At one point, I couldn’t tell if the work was actually boring, or if I was simply bored from reading it for the millionth goddamned time.
It will get tiring. Your work didn’t magically get worse while you were working on your revisions, (unless you suck at writing, I guess,) so take a break from it, and come back with fresh eyes in a few days, or even a week.
I was so tired of re-reading my own work over and over that I had to take a few days away from it, play some Resident Evil 2, and survive the undead horrors of Raccoon City for a while, just to clear my head and relax.
Author’s Note: I am a zombie re-deadening MACHINE. Those freaks barely got out an “ugh” before I was giving their foreheads a new reading nook with my nine-millimeter. In real life, however, I would probably be covered in a little more pee.
So, there you have it. It’s not a glorious list, but it’s a few things to keep in mind when re-re-re-working your work. It was definitely an effort, but I feel I’ve improved because of it. I want the rest of you to really get cracking on those novels, screenplays, and psychotic manifestos! I finally got mine finished; and if I can do it, so can you! Now get out there and make me proud!
You don’t have to make me proud, if you don’t want to. I’m not some high-strung little league parent who whines like a little baby when I’m drinking and shooting my gun at the other team’s kids to throw them off their game! I coach little league by MY OWN rules!