Dec 10 2008
Editing - the final countdown
And now for the final stage of editing! If you can, print off the whole manuscript. Get yourself a red pen. Find yourself a quiet spot in a comfy chair, with a glass of water or a cup of tea to keep your throat moist.
Now start from the beginning and read the whole thing aloud. Yes, seriously! Don’t just read on automatic – pretend that your book has been chosen to be an Audio Book for the deaf, and you’ve been asked to record it. Read with feeling, as if you had an audience.
If you’ve been wondering why you’re doing this, you’ll find out pretty soon. Most writers are highly literate, so they read silently much faster than they can read aloud. That means you can skim over mistakes and scan clumsy sentences without noticing. Reading aloud slows you down so you become more aware of the words.
If your sentences are too long, you’ll run out of breath before you get to the end of them. Your readers may be reading silently, but they will mentally run out of breath, too – so get that red pen out and find a way to shorten or split those sentences.
If you trip over words or phrases, it’s a sign your prose isn’t flowing as smoothly as it should. It may just be that you need to improve your punctuation, or you may need to do major revisions. Stop, get out your red pen and revise it until you can read without hiccups.
You may find that exciting scenes don’t sound as climactic when you read them aloud. If that’s the case, you may have rushed them too much. The secret to conveying speed and action in print is to do the reverse – slow down, going into more detail than usual, documenting your character’s every reaction and sensation. Don’t try to rewrite whole problem passages like this on the spot – mark them to be worked on later.
If yours is a long story, it may take you several days to do this exercise, but believe me, it is very worthwhile.
You’re right. Reading aloud is one of the best ways to slow down and see how your story sounds to other people. You can also record your voice into a microphone and save it to your computer. When you hear the playback, all sorts of issues will turn up.