Editing can be a huge investment – in both time and money – especially for the new author who is yet to make anything from their writing. It can also be a risk, particularly if you pass your manuscript to an editor too soon. If there are things you can fix before you hand your work over, better to self-edit as far as possible first so that you get the most out of the edit you’re paying for.

Character – Motivation and Goal

In all stories, characters need to want something (a goal) and a reason to want it (motivation). For example, at the beginning of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Belle’s goal is to save her father from the Beast. Her motivation is the love she has for her father. Without her motivation, her goal doesn’t exist; and if she didn’t need to save her father, the reader might not see her motivation either. And as a romance, if Belle’s goal didn’t put her in the Beast’s path, then there might not have been a romance at all! 

When self-editing, make sure that your protagonist has a clear goal and motivation. They may change during the story, but should always exist in some form. In romance, the love interest needs to have a goal and motivation too – and to make things really delicious, try to make sure their goal is in conflict with your protagonist’s (it’ll the heighten the will they, won’t they tension!).

Character Arcs

Linked to characters’ motivations and goals, protagonists and other significant secondary characters should have a clear character arc, where they learn something over the course of the novel. For example, at first, Belle is terrified of the Beast, but over time, she learns to love him. And for the Beast, he is selfish and unkind at the beginning of the story, but learns to love despite appearances. If a character is perfect and they have nothing to learn, they will struggle to engage a reader for 300 or so pages. What is a romance without hurdles to overcome or conflict to resolve? These are the ingredients that make us celebrate the moment the couple finally get together.

Genre

Readers – and agents – have genre expectations and when you, or they, eventually market a novel, it will need to fit into a genre or subgenre. For a romance, this means your novel should have a happily ever after or a happy for now. It might also include tropes specific to the romance genre, like enemies to lovers or second chance love. If the Beast was to die at the end of Beauty and the Beast we would be shocked and disappointed, so it’s important to make sure your novel matches the readers’ expectations of the genre before you send it to your editor.

Where should you really begin?

As a writer, I’ve been told to shave several chapters off the beginning of a novel more than once. A good rule of thumb is to ‘enter late and exit early’, meaning the reader should enter the scene, or novel, at the latest possible moment and leave as soon as they can. This can be applied to a whole novel or individual scenes. If a chapter or scene isn’t moving the story forward in more than one way, then it’s possibly worth cutting it before you send it to an editor.

Chapter Endings

This links to the idea of ‘enter late, leave early’. A book is a page turner if at the end of a chapter, the reader doesn’t roll over and go to sleep, but instead keeps reading until the early hours of the morning (this has been me so many times!). The key to this is to ensure that the ending of each chapter is sufficiently satisfying, but also leaves the reader wanting more. Before you send your work to an editor, it’s worth looking at the end of each chapter to make sure it has the sense of a cliffhanger and that it’s likely to keep a reader engaged.

Exposition

When I write my first draft, it’s mostly about getting the story down onto paper. My first drafts are always hideously messy. In rewrites, this often means I need to get rid of lengthy exposition – affectionately known as info dumps. These are hefty paragraphs, often at the beginning of chapters, where I tell the reader a whole heap of information. Sometimes it’s information that only I need to know and it can be cut entirely. Other times, it’s important, but would be much more effective if I sprinkled it through the text or allowed my characters to show the reader what I need them to know over time. 

As you know, Bob

When I try to get rid of exposition, I sometimes fall into the trap of ‘As you know, Bobs’. These are moments when a character tells another character something that they already know. The conversation is there to give information to the reader, and not because the characters need to have the conversation at that specific moment to move the story forward. It can sound unnatural and is really just another form of exposition or info dump. As with exposition, the way to remove these moments is to find a way of sprinkling the information through the manuscript in a different way, perhaps by showing it through a character’s behaviour.

Head-hopping

Romance novels are often written in first person or limited third person, meaning that for a lot of our writing, we are pretty much inside someone else’s head. That means readers will only be able to witness the same things that our hero or heroine witnesses. But that’s not always the case. Occasionally, we slip into someone else’s head and give the reader an insight into their feelings – it’s easily done when writing a romance! It’s important to look out for these instances during the self-editing process and make sure that the narrative remains in the experience of the narrator at any particular moment.

Inconsistencies

How many times have I read through a first draft of my novel and found that the hero’s eye colour changes from blue to hazel to grey in the space of seven chapters? Once, I even submitted a manuscript to an agent where the mother’s name was June for all but one chapter, when she became Margery for no apparent reason. The shame! Inconsistencies will always happen – especially when we are working through several rewrites. If you can’t see the wood for the trees with little things like this, a beta reader can be super helpful at spotting inconsistencies in your writing. 

Filler Words

I just love repeating certain words in my first drafts (and subsequent drafts, if I’m honest). Words such as really, just and while always creep in and my characters seem to have inexplicably energetic eyebrows. They also like to look at things. I don’t always notice these fillers, but a quick ‘find’ in word will usually highlight how many times I’ve used a specific word (148 ‘reallys’ really is excessive). Beta readers are useful again in this instance, as is something like Grammarly or ProWritingAid. These websites will highlight repeated word use and then you can make a note and address them during your rewrite.

And finally…

One of the best pieces of advice I received about self-editing is letting your manuscript rest. It’s amazing when you put away a draft for a couple of months and read it with fresh eyes a little while later. It feels oddly like someone else’s writing; I’m always pleasantly surprised that it isn’t the pile of poop I thought it was after powering through NaNoWriMo. And most of all, it helps me to think about and spot many of the self-editing considerations I’ve listed above.

Once you’ve self-edited as much as you can, you’re halfway there, and it’s probably time to pass your work to an editor for a developmental edit or a manuscript assessment to identify the next steps. Happy editing!

If you are considering working with a Developmental Editor or Copyeditor soon or are in the market for a Manuscript Assessment, contact me to talk about your project.