Dec 02 2008
How to Edit and Why It’s Important
As I said before, if you want to be a successful novelist, it’s not enough to sell your book. You need people to read your novel all the way to the end, so they’ll look forward to buying your next one. Remember that it’s rare for people to read a whole book at one sitting - your readers are going to put it down several times before they finish it. You need to give them a really good reason to pick it up again and continue reading.
Every story has peaks and troughs – unless it’s a full-on, action-packed Bond-style yarn, but even then you need some breathing space or it’ll read like a series of stunts with cardboard characters and no story. It’s easy to keep your readers engaged in the peaks, because they want to know what happens next. It’s not so easy in the troughs. So how do you ensure you don’t lose them
I’ll take it as a given that you have likeable protagonists (i.e. your hero, heroine or both) and an interesting plot. You have two other main tools to “hook” your reader. One is the clever use of chapters – most newbies split their chapters at the natural breaks, which is usually the wrong place altogether. The other is the use of powerful language to paint such a vivid picture, the reader becomes completely involved in the world you’ve created. In my next few posts, I’ll look at these tools in more detail and how you can fine-tune them during the editing process.
