Editing

One thing I've learned from my teachers at the University of Toronto is -- once I have marked up my story, novel, or whatever -- read it aloud.

At first, I felt kind of stupid reading my prose out; after all, I live alone, except for my cat. But they suggested this as a self-editing technique, so I was determined that I was going to try it.

The first few pages went smoothly because I had already polished them several times. I was on the fifth page of my novel when I started hearing flaws that my eyes hadn't caught. One problem was that there were occasionally too many sounds were the same in a short space, even though they looked different on the page. Another flaw was that, in trying to vary my sentence length, Isometimes had run-on sentences. Other times, I used people's names too close together when there was a group chatting.

Some of these problems I can put down to the rush to get 50,000 words of my story out of me and into the computer in 30 days. But I'm not rushed now. I have no excuse for these errors.

Reading my story out loud has also helped me slow down and find errors in my punctuation. I though MSWord was supposed to catch these sorts of typos.

But the most important aspect to this technique has been to make me stop and think about what I'm reading -- and whether or not it's moving the story along. In the first 85 pages, I've now cut 7 pages. There was one scene (a little over 3 pages) that did not move the story forward or tell us anything new about the characters involved in it. I had read it silently several times and had been quite pleased with it, but I tend to read quickly so it didn't seem as long. Reading it aloud is a slower task but, oh, so worth it. Out it went.

Now finished 100 pages (of 245) and am ready to keep going as soon as I've finished the latest round of paperwork for my separation.