by Rachel D. Russell, @RDRussellWrites

I recently completed my first line edits on a manuscript. I won’t even venture a guess as to how my editor’s mind can keep track of all the things. Like the fact that my heroine shrugged her shoulder 98,625 times in the novel (really, she’s not as apathetic as that might make her sound). Or, my hero, whose lips curved into a smile 103,268 times (yes, he really is that nice of a guy).

Okay, while that might be a tad of hyperbole, it’s grounded in truth. My line editor caught all the repeated phrases, chronological mix-ups, and confusing paragraphs that a reader would have encountered. In addition, she caught all my sleep-deprived mind’s misused words (homonyms, anyone?), superfluous spaces, grammatical guffaws, and extraneous ellipses.

Even awkward alliteration.

I won’t tell you the exact number of items she touched the 290-page manuscript, but it was significant. In turn, it’s been a significantly process to work through each of those details. 

Akin to childbirth. (That phrase “book baby” has a whole new meaning to me now.)

After laboring through the corrections, my manuscript has been reborn. Fresh, nuanced, and so much better than before.
My readers will enjoy a seamless story. One that will not assault their sense of the English language, nor jerk them out of the story world like the coin in Somewhere in Time.

As a newbie to professional line edits, here are a few tips I’m using on my next novel to help minimize some common issues.

1. Create a who’s-who. Keep a spreadsheet of character names, visual details, relationship to other characters. It’ll make for a quick reference for the current book and any future ones in a series.

2. Keep a calendar of the novel’s days, weeks, or years. Track of the passage of time throughout your novel to make sure passage of time references make sense.

3. Use an emotion-based thesaurus or people watch to pick up unique and varied body language. If you have a go-to movement that often gets plugged in during scene creation, use the search function to review the manuscript and replace most of those identical phrases with unique movements, tags, or descriptions.

4. Know what style to use. The Chicago Manual of Style is most common for fiction. After years of freelance writing, I made style choices that were a no-go for fiction.

Getting the first manuscript back with professional line edits was a bit daunting, but, chipping away at those corrections, not only made it a better novel, it’s made me a better writer. 

 

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Rachel D. Russell writes contemporary inspirational romance focused on forgiveness, redemption, and grace. She’s a member of Oregon Christian Writer and My Book Therapy’s Novel Academy. She’s currently writing two novels in the Deep Haven series with Sunrise Publishing. When Rachel’s not cantering her horse down the Oregon beaches, she’s probably interrogating her husband on his own military and law enforcement experience to craft believable heroes in uniform. The rest of her time is spent enjoying her active family, including two teens and three keyboard-hogging cats. You can catch up with her at RachelDRussell.com, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.