In a guest post on Jami Gold’s blog, Wendi Sparrow shares her method for line editing your own work.
Sparrow keeps a list of trouble areas to search and fix before she passes her manuscript on to an agent or editor. “It filled in as I researched what other authors were doing,” Sparrow writes. “Having worked with a lot of different editors in the past thirteen years meant that I could fix the mistakes I was finding as I came across them, and that was nice.”
Her list helps Sparrow looks for trouble words. For example, using MS Word’s search function, she realized the draft of her latest book at 1800 uses of the word “it” rather than more descriptive language. She also hunts for prepositional phrases, adverbs, overused adjectives, and character actions, such as nodding.
By the time Sparrow had finished her list, it was seven pages long. “It took an entire month to get through the ever-expanding list,” she says. “Two to three weeks would have been comparable to some of the passes I’ve done with editors.”
After cleaning up her narrative, Sparrow found it easier to identify other trouble spots. ‘I discovered that this piece-by-piece revision had created paragraphs that needed segues between them at times,” she says. “I also discovered many different plot holes that I hadn’t seen when the narrative was more cluttered. Characters were more vibrant and their conflicts and passions were more clear.”
Sparrow includes a copy of her spreadsheet on the post for download. “Your mileage may vary with this list,” she says. “You may be able to skip entire sections, or you could take a few words from this and call it good.”
