Getting Your Novel Published: Editing

My journey in publishing started four years ago, when I wrote "The End" of my first novel. Actually, it started a few weeks earlier, when I could see the end in sight, and was excitedly researching how to get it published!

Little did I know what a journey was ahead of me. Over the next year or so, I met many writers, both on the net, by email and in person, and researched many, many pages on writing and publishing. Along the way I learned that although I had written "The End" on my novel, it was far from finished - and a long way from being ready for publication.

That manuscript deserved no more than the title of "First Draft", in spite of the editing I'd done as I went along. I couldn't see that at the time, because every writer is in love with their first manuscript. Like most other writers, my first book was the book of my heart, the book I had to write. It took me a long time to get enough perspective to admit it wasn't as perfect as I thought!

Your school teacher may have told you creativity was more important than spelling or grammar - she was lying.

Whether you want to get the attention of a book publisher or a literary agent, or attract a loyal legion of fans for your self-published novels, you won't get anywhere with a rough diamond: the competition is too intense. Your grammar and spelling must be impeccable, your sentences must flow naturally and easily and there must be no clunky sentence structures, soggy boring patches or purple prose. In other words, your book should be a pleasure to read.

As the writer, of course you find your manuscript easy to read - so you're no judge. The only way to get an unbiased view is to involve other people. Family and friends do not count - they're not going to be ruthless enough! Ideally, you should use a professional editor. Second-best are fellow writers, such as a writer's circle.

You can cut down on the time and cost of professional editing by doing some groundwork yourself. The first step (below) is spelling and grammar.

Perfect spelling is easy to achieve. Use a spell checker, but read each suggested correction before you approve it. Spell checkers don't check meaning, they simply pick the word that's the closest match. If youre not sure what the suggested word means, look it up!

Grammar checkers are less useful, because they apply very strict grammatical rules which would work perfectly well for a university thesis - but not for fiction.

These days when we write fiction, we don't write as the omniscient author. We put ourselves inside the heads of our characters and write from their point of view. To create that illusion, we need to choose words that reflect the way that character would speak. That means our prose is more colloquial and casual than the books of earlier times, which inevitably means it includes a fair amount of bad grammar. So if you edit all your bad grammar out, your writing is going to sound stilted and old-fashioned.

It's still well worth running a Grammar Checker, so long as you don't regard it as the authority. Look at what it suggests and don't feel guilty about clicking on the "Ignore" button. One of a writers most valuable skills is to understand grammar rules well enough that you know when it's OK to break them!

In my next Hub, I'll cover some more basic editing work you can do before submitting your work for critique to a writer's circle or professional editor.

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Text copyright Marisa Wright. Photo by Nic's events.