Editing Tips

If you’re a writer, you might be interested in knowing that I don’t know everything. However, I do have some experience and I’m more than willing to share it so you can learn from my mistakes. Case in point: editing a book with multiple characters and/or narrators. This may seem like common sense or generate a “Duh!” from you, but I have a feeling some authors don’t do this. The easiest way to communicate this tip is by using some examples. For The Drop series every chapter, and oftentimes sections within chapters, are written about different characters. The books are narrated in third person, although that’s not important in this case but comes into play with my next example. These books include well over a dozen people, meaning I have to write about all those characters and keep them straight in my head. The way I write those books is continuous. Meaning I jump from character to character and pretty much write the book in the way you’re going to read it. My editing tip is that on one of your editing reads (I hope you go back and read through your draft multiple times), you should pick each character and read their story continuously. Meaning if I start with Character A in Chapter 1 and the next time I tell more about their story is in Chapter 6 followed by Chapter 10 followed by Chapter 13, I should read 1-6-10-13 and so on until I get to the end of their story.

Another example is my most recent book, First Step, where I alternate chapters between two characters. I told you the POV would make an appearance. Both characters are also first-person narrators of their respective chapters. During one of my read-throughs of the draft involved reading every other chapter for Eve and another pass where I read every other chapter of Ray’s. What’s the point? In this case, I caught inconsistencies that wouldn’t have been fatal to the story, but they would’ve been proof of bad writing. In one case, I had Eve bathing in a river in one chapter. A few chapters later, her story resumes and she’s clothed. An error like that makes the reader pause, taking themselves momentarily out of the flow of the book. Just to be clear, that’s a bad thing. Also, by reading their chapters in order, you make sure their voice is consistent. This is very important when writing in first person. You don’t want their voices to blend or overlap, taking away the distinctiveness of their characters. Another example is from The Drop: Season Three (to be released later this month, I hope), where I have a character who is thankful for safety on the planet and even says a prayer. As I was reading through the chapters in sequence of another character, he says some things that were meant for the first character. In other words, I mixed them up while writing the draft. That’s an egregious error. Would I have caught it reading through the book sequentially? Maybe, but I darn sure caught it using this editing method. If you’re writing a book with these structures, you owe it to yourself and your readers to read through your draft at least once to follow the story of each character in order.