Ep 294 Five Tips for Self-Editing Your Manuscript

Welcome to Pencils and Lipstick. This is a podcast for indie authors. I'm Cat Caldwell, novelist, short story writer, and book coach. Here on Pencils and Lipstick, we're obsessed with bold things story, and it is my goal to bring you the writing tips that you need to make your novel come to life. Welcome back to Pencils and Lipstick.

This is episode two ninety four, and this is, this is the second time around because I forgot to turn on the microphone last time. All right. So we today are going to go through a couple of pointers on how to self edit. So I'm Kat Caldwell. I'm your hostess for, today.

There is no interview today, but thank you so much for listening. And if you are listening and you know somebody who would benefit from a couple self editing tips, please share and like and subscribe and all the things on the podcast. It helps move the podcast forward. So today is January 19 as I record this again, and I've been thinking a little bit about self editing. I am deep in the weeds of of editing the book, the the contemporary romance and then the historical romance.

And here's the thing, like, when I say self editing, I do not mean that, you don't get an editor. I truly believe in getting an editor for your book. I know a lot of people, it is a big expense for the book, or just in general, it's a big expense, but, having a professional eye on your book, I 100% agree with. It's just part of the business. It has to be sort of folded into your business model.

That's my opinion. So I'm not really saying, you know, when you get these, the self editing done, you're good to go. Some of you will decide that you're good to go. That is a personal decision, but even if you get an editor, you need to have your manuscript as good as possible, in order to get the, like, bang out of your buck. Okay?

So when I receive a manuscript, if it's pretty much a mess, I will send it back and tell them to edit more. I know quite a few editors who do this because you're you're just not able, as an editor, to then focus on what really needs, you know, the tweaking that needs to be done to get the book to where it should be. Instead you're, you're sort of doing all these things that the writer could have done themselves. And a lot of times editors will then charge you more for that because it just takes more time. So the things that I have learned over the years of coaching and editing and then writing and editing my own books before I send them off to the editor, we are going to go through today.

Okay. So the first thing that I want you to do when you have quote unquote, air quotes, finished your manuscript is to go to the beginning and read the first four ish chapters. This really depends on if you have a dual point of view, it might be the four to five chapters. If it's a one point of view, it might be sort of maybe just the first, second, third, and possibly read them out of order. That's up to you.

But here's the thing that I have noticed over and over and over again, and even in some books that people decide to publish, is that it is a repetition of the introduction of the character. And this is why this happens. As we start writing the book, whether we are, plotters or pantsers, we're still getting to know the character. It really doesn't matter how much you've done on the character. You're still getting to know the character and write them into it.

And, and you can't stop like your imagination. That's where it kicks in. And you're, you're sort of introducing them and to not really the reader, even at that point, they're, you're introducing them to you. And I have noticed over and over and over again that a lot of times, those first few chapters have quite a bit of repetition in them. And a lot of times, it's almost exactly the same, repetition.

So, you know, like like, she works in a coffee shop and her, you know, she's like the owner or the manager or whatever. And, and coffee, the coffee smell permeates her clothing, you know, and that's just part of her and whatever, and that can be written really beautifully. And then literally in the next chapter, there'll be like, she threw on a sweatshirt that still smelled of coffee, no matter how many times she tried to wash it. It's like, we already know that. And then it would go on, you know, to say more about the, the coffee or, or we introduce, I read one recently where he was ex military and it was reintroducing his PTSD in this almost the exact same way twice in the second and in the fourth chapter.

This happens a lot. And what you need to do is go back and, search for phrases. Like you just, you need to make sure that they are different and you most likely when you were writing it, possibly some days or weeks went by, or you went back and edited it and didn't and thought, well, the first chapter is fine. And then few days, you know, you edited maybe the second or the third and didn't realize that you were putting in the same thing. I mean, here's the thing, like we write these books over the course of weeks to months to years, and the reader's reading them in the course of like minutes to hours to days.

So clearly they are going to be able to remember a lot more. So please, please, please make sure that your beginning chapters are not reintroducing the characters, are not repeating clever things several times. Yeah, just make sure that that's not happening. Okay? The second one is is the inciting incident.

The inciting incident has to make sense for the for the for the plot to keep going and the reader to keep being interested. And if you don't really know what the inciting incident is, that's a problem. You need to know. The inciting incident well, in general, if you don't know what your inciting incident is, that's a problem. In general, an inciting incident is the moment in which the main character's life is going to change and go down the path of the story.

Okay. That's how I like to see it. They don't necessarily know that their life is about to change, but, it is. That is kind of where the story starts. So they had their life before the inciting incident, and now they have their life after the inciting incident.

Now, one thing you do have to be careful for a lot, a lot of genres is too much backstory before the inciting incident happens. Yeah. I recently, last fall, edited one in which I think the ins the inciting incident didn't really happen, I think, for 10 chapters. And it, it was a fantasy, so I gave it a little lax, you know, okay. Where is it?

Where is it? Where is it? And then I was like, this has to change or it should change. I mean, really, in the end, you're the writer, so you can decide. But she, the writer, thought that the inciting incident was when the sister left.

I said, no, the inciting incident was when it happens to the main character. So because the main character's life didn't change when the sister left, The main character's life changed when she traveled, she like made the decision to travel. Okay. That's where her life completely started to change. And you know, whether you agree with me or not, that's fine.

But just make your backstory, if you're going to choose to do that, your backstory better be really interesting. And one way to, like, combat that, because a lot of people say, well, all that backstory is needed. Like the reader needs to know that stuff. And that might be true, but does the reader need to know it right in the beginning? Or can the reader know it later on?

And in fact, there are times that I we I'm writing I'm reading a book or I'm editing a book and I'm reading all this backstory, and then it's referenced again later on in the book. And I always think, almost always, this is where that, that backstory could have come and it could have been taken out of the beginning. And if you want it in the beginning, definitely take it out at the end, but honestly like flashbacks or memories, or, you know, the, the main character connecting the dots in something later on in the book, that's much more compelling to learn more about the backstory than to learn all of it up front. Okay. Number three, when you are self editing your book or when your manuscript is done and you're rereading it as some people do.

If you guys didn't listen last week to my conversation with Anthony, you should totally go listen to it because that at some point, I say I admit that when I was first writing my my first book, I really thought that editing was just rereading the book. And I didn't know any of this. I hope that this stuff helps you guys. So number three, you need to know the goals and motivations of your characters. All of them, everybody that is a main character and will be a main character in the end.

You need to know, what their ghost or their third rail is. And you might not have known that in the beginning and that's okay. But by the end of, you know, putting the end on that manuscript, you should now know it. And so what you need to do is go back into the beginning and make sure that you were writing it from the point of view of that character's goal, motivation, and third rail. Okay.

This is pretty important because that is where the character will feel really off to the reader, where they started out as one thing and then, change into another. That is probably one of the harder things to do in the editing process when you realize, oh, my character doesn't start out properly, so now I have to go back and change it. That's a lot of work. But it's so necessary. It is so necessary.

One trick that you can do is at the beginning, analyze your character at the end of the book, how they are, what decisions they've made and go back and make sure that they're pretty much the opposite in the beginning. So if they have, come to realize something and grown and matured, maybe they're like very young, make sure that they're quite naive in the beginning. This goes along with a little bit of, when you, if you, if you say that your character is, you know, breaks the rules all the time and they never actually break the rules in the book, that's a problem. So you need to go back and make sure, you know, maybe highlight where you talk about the main character to the reader or to somebody else, you know, and make highlight the little mentions of how their personality is and whatever, and then make sure that that matches up with their actions throughout the book. Again, all the, the character development is a lot more work, than any sort of grammar or sentence tweaking, this, but this is really, really important to, to, to get right.

If you are going to have a series, I highly recommend that you really understand the characters and how, what their goal and motivation will be throughout each book. That's I know that's a hard ask, and it's not an ask that I necessarily have followed, although I write standalones, mine are not, as interconnected. But even still, like I'm writing, Stepping Across the Thames, which was Claire's story for the historical romance. And I have to keep going back to the first book and see like what I set her up as and make sure that she's continuing to behave the same way. Now five years have passed, so she can be a little bit different, but she can't be too different, right?

So I, I am kind of in a corner there, I have to keep her how she is. And so you can end up writing yourself into a corner if you don't really think that through. Writing remembers as much thinking as it is typing on the keyboard. For number four, I'm going to go into plot a little bit. So when you, when you set up the plot, when people say like, don't, don't jam your character into the plot.

I'm sure you've heard this or like, don't try to like force the plot on the character. Your plot needs to make some make sense. So somebody wrote to me and was telling me their whole plot. It was very, very long email and I hope that I answered it adequately. So I'm going to sort of talk it through right now.

It was like, she needed them to be forced into marriage, but not the marriage to be consummated because of some law that the kingdom had that once it's consummated, then they're actually Queen maybe, or maybe then the the kid well, that that would be that would work out. So somehow this law would go into effect, and so she didn't want them to consummate, but she wanted the marriage to be in secret, and then she needed them to move in order and basically what it came down to was she needed the main character to be in this other place in order to find something that will then be necessary in the second book. Okay. And what I told her is, it feels to me like you are adding words more than plot. I mean, that's really that's, something that you have to take to heart and you have to really analyze yourself because the you do not want to lose the reader.

And if the reader thinks that you're taking them on this journey for no reason other than to sort of like add more details of the world there without any reason or to add more pages to your book, you really run the risk of them putting the book down. Okay. In fantasy, especially if you're just adding pages to show what the world looks like or sci fi, I would be careful with that. It better be something that your readers really enjoy. But more than that, what the plot needs to do is to line up with what the character is doing, so that it feels inevitable.

Now, remember that the reader is always trying to figure out the plot and the story as they're reading and that's normal. And so what you don't want to do is make the plot convoluted or, or, or move away because you feel like the reader is figuring it out too quickly. You're probably going to get some poor reviews that way. Because what the reader is then going to feel is that you are trying to treat them like kindergartners when they're not. And if they feel like that at all, they're probably not going to keep reading the book.

They might finish that book, but they might not go on to the second book. Your plot has to line up with the goals and the motivations and the decisions of the main characters to the point where it feels inevitable. Like if they make a decision to travel somewhere, it has to make sense. And it has to feel inevitable, like that was for sure going to happen. But in this one, it was travel there and twenty four hours later travel back and it didn't feel inevitable.

What it felt like is that she was making them travel to have the main character find something. And I asked her like, why can't she just find it where she is? And she couldn't answer that question, which means she probably could have found it where she is, you know? So again, it takes some thinking, but you have to sort of, it does help to, to, to write out or the, like a outline after the fact, even if you have finished the book, really go through, read each chapter and write out the plot points of that chapter and see if it's lining up with your character's decisions and it feels inevitable. And if it's, you're not sure that is where you get somebody to read it and you ask them, does the plot feel inevitable?

Another reader, a writer wrote to me and asked about, a book that she had written in, in the beta readers had said that it felt like things came too easy to the main character. And she said, you know, she had forced him to make these decisions. He chose the poor girl instead of the rich girl because it was morally correct. Or you know, it was like within his moral compass more. And she thought, you know, that's a hard decision to make, but then in the end, the somebody, I don't know how I don't remember anymore, ends up giving him loaning him the money that he needed or something to build his business.

And like, eventually, you know, there was a happily ever after ending things sort of worked out for them. And, but the reader said, well, I feel like it just happened too easily. And that goes right back into, does it feel inevitable? Have you set up these, like, these plot points beforehand, that the reader feels like they're on the right trail and, and that when they look back, they go, oh, yeah. Okay.

That makes sense then. And if that's not true, if people are just making these decisions out of the goodness of their heart, that can happen in real life, but that's not really what story is. Okay. So we have to be careful. And this is something I had to be careful with is like, I want my stories to be very realistic to real life.

And it is possible that every once in a while, you know, somebody will come and be like, I'll loan you the money. Whatever. I don't know what it was. Just out of the goodness of their heart or because they love you or whatever. But that, that doesn't, that doesn't really usually line up with story.

Usually we need it to line up with the decisions that they've made. You know, maybe the guy could have bet on something if it was like historical fiction, I would say like he bet on a whaling ship that news got back that the ship had had sank. And so he thinks that all of his money is lost and news gets, you know, after he makes the correct decision, the ship comes back and everyone is surprised and they make all this money because they used to get whales for like the oil or something. I don't know. I was reading something about it that just came off the top of my head.

But, but again, it goes into, does this feel inevitable? And it, it is difficult if some, if the readers overwhelmingly say it feels too easy, you might have a lot of rewriting to do, unfortunately. Unfortunately, if from what I knew or read about this book, if I had been her coach, I would have said, make him choose wrong and then have the story be about that. But that's a big rewrite, right? Like that is changing the story.

This happened to me with blended loyalty. I literally had to throw 40,000 words away and, and restart, and it was worth it, but it's not fun in the, in the moment for sure. It's definitely not fun in the moment. So that is something else that you want to look out for. I would also say for anybody for so number four, for anyone writing a series, be very careful with cliffhangers.

Okay. Cliffhangers are not necessarily ratcheted tension. What you have to do, what you should do for each book is have the majority of the plot points tied up at the end, and then possibly introduce a new side character, which introduces a bit of a cliffhanger. Remember if you're my age, when we would watch shows and May would come and it would be the last show of the season and it would always end on a cliffhanger. Right.

And we were always like, oh, I really want to watch what happens next. We were so invested in the show and we had already, like the show writers had already earned our trust enough that more likely than that, we would be there for the September, you know, first show of the season. They earned our trust by tying up most plot points every single episode. So something would happen and, you know, let's say friends, like when Monica and Chandler are dating and they don't want anyone to know about it, but people are starting to find out and they wrap up the plot points somehow. Right?

I think at one point Rachel and Joey know about it. Right? And then we, we sort of real then they, they realized that they each know. And it doesn't mean that every single plot point was wrapped up, that we still wanted to know what, what came next, you know, in the next episode, but the main points of that moment of that episode were wrapped up. And I really believe that you should do that for the book, for each book.

You otherwise, you really rung the risk of people not picking up your second book or third or fourth or whatever. Cliffhangers are very challenging, and dicey territory. I don't, I don't suggest anybody do it. And if you are creating more questions at the end of the book in order to sort of create this, this cliffhanger, to sort of create this desire for the reader to go on, The reader having more questions does not necessarily mean that they have more interest. It does not necessarily mean that you have developed more intrigue in the story.

So this is a hard one. You are going to have to go back and think, is this intriguing or is this annoying? Right. So a book I read a while ago, everything started happening about one, you know, the last third of the story, which is normal, but like, there were more questions every, every conversation. They were, like, trying to hide something from her, trying, you know, and she was just like, oh, I can't believe everyone's trying to hide things from me.

You know, instead of kind of demanding and figuring it out and and trying to to, like, and being mad about it, like, really, honestly. And there were all these questions, like, who is that? And why is that person being introduced now? And wait a minute. I thought that this was going to be happening and now it's clearly not happening because my Kindle says that it's at 95%.

So we're almost done with the book. The questions at the end were more that I had. It felt more annoying than it felt like intrigue. This takes some skill in writing intrigue enough for them to go on to the next book. So, many of us will be able to say, you didn't earn my trust enough.

You didn't wrap up enough plot points in this book in order for me to trust that you will do the same in the next book. And this is not an unusual thing. This has happened with several series. And sometimes people read actually quite a few books before eventually people start giving up and saying, this is never going to be wrapped up. This is annoying.

So it kind of depends. You might get some people to go on, you might get some people dropping off. But I would be very careful with that. I would be very careful and make sure that just because there are a lot of questions at the end does not mean that there's a lot of intrigue at the end. So that is definitely something to watch out for, please, please, please.

I want you guys to, write books where people have so much intrigue that they want to keep going to the next book. Also, I would, I would say that, if you're going to end on a cliffhanger, that book better be so well edited, that, that I can trust the next one will be as well. So you don't want all four of these problems in that one book and expect you, you can't have all those problems and then expect the reader to go on in the majority of the cases. Alright. So the other thing that you can do most definitely, and this one is easy, is find your filler words.

Lots and lots of filler words. Make sure that your your sentences are active and not passive. And honestly, you get to use ProWritingAid for this or Grammarly for this. I highly suggest you look up what active and passive means, and look up the filler words. A lot of times they're that just, I used to have a list here for you, but they're easy to find.

And, you know, prorating aid and Grammarly, I'm sure there are other things, auto create, all those, they will also look for, like the main words that that you're repeating all the time. It depends on the genre, but, like, for for romance, it might be eyes or look or lips or mouth, that you need to look for, for mystery might be questions or like literally question or looking as well or searching, things like that. So you, you know, you get to use those programs to go find those repetitive words. You don't want the editor that you're paying to have to mark those up for you. I also highly suggest that you review dialogue tags and how they work, commas as well.

Most editors will get annoyed with that being done improperly and send it back to you, or they will charge you more. Understand as well that dialogue tags differ in different countries. So in England, you might just have like, almost like an apostrophe looking for the dialogue tag, whereas we have the quotation marks. In France and in Spain, you just sort of have like an em dash, just follow your country's rules and then wherever you want to sell it, I would ask your editor or see if you can have two different manuscripts for that. Americans get real annoyed when they don't see the quotation mark.

I think we all think that everyone's American and has the same rules. So, so anyway, I know quite a few writers who have two different manuscripts, one for Europe and one for America. So there's that as well. These are things that, you know, you definitely, the biggest ones that you're going to have to, that will take the biggest, the most amount of time, most likely is the character development and the plot points. I would also, I want to repeat keeping with the main character, with all the characters' personalities and how you set them up.

If you need to set them up differently, do that. Maybe they progress into being more boisterous and they were timid at first, just change it. It's okay. Go, go find it, in the beginning and change them up. However you have them at the end is usually how you want them to be.

And so you're just going to have to go back and change that. I also highly recommend that you understand that you're, you know, not just the, the inciting incident, but the climax, the midpoint, the plop points, the twists. So you need to understand where those are going and what function they have. I'll put some links in the show notes below, but C L Lake C S Lakin, L A K I N, she has some great, kind of mini courses on those on exactly the kind of the scene points that you need. I will also put a link in the show notes below for my masterclass on, finding the story for the character that haunts you.

And it really goes into, figuring out a lot of times we, the character comes to us how they're supposed to be at the end. And we have so much trouble creating a story for them because we don't realize that they cannot be the person at the end, at the beginning, they need to be kind of the opposite. So figuring out if the person, the character that you're seeing is kind of already fully developed and already the hero of his own story, then you need to make them kind of the opposite in the beginning. And it helps to make this helps you keep from making the character to what we call perfect. We are not talking about a perfect person who always chooses correctly, who, you know, that's not what people are, are really talking about when they say that.

What they're talking about is that the character never changes that much, that they're, they're already at that hero point from the beginning. And it makes it really difficult to write a story like about that character, because the point of story is that that character is changing and they are finding a new way to live their life. And we are experiencing that alongside with them. And if that's not happening, then there isn't much of a story. So I'll link that, below.

I know that these are only five points. I'm sure other people have many points, because we can always keep editing. I do want to recommend that at some point you do have to hand this off to somebody else. I still want to repeat myself that finding an editor to work with is going to be the best idea before you publish. And I do know that it's expensive.

I do know that, but you want your book to be the best that it could possibly be, the best story that it could possibly be, because that is what's going to guarantee that people are going to want to read the next one. And it's going to guarantee that people don't put it down. Okay. So I don't want that for you. I want everyone to keep reading your story.

I want them to finish it. I want them to be ravenous for the next one. If you absolutely cannot afford an editor, find another writer who understands story and be each other's beta readers, but you're going to have to ask them some hard questions about your story and you're still going to need to be able to take the criticism however it comes. Remember that when people are helping you improve your story, they are not making a judgment on you. It is not personal, even though it feels personal, they are trying to help you make this story as good as it possibly can be.

Okay. Maybe we need to talk about that someday too, but I hope that you can take these five points and apply them to what you are editing now. If you have any questions, of course, you can find me on Instagram at author underscore katcaldwell and on TikTok, at katcaldwell author. The links are in the show notes below. If you're on my newsletter, and of course you should be, you can always reply to any email that I send.

I will be sending this, these five points this week, in newsletter form so that you can see them written. So definitely get on my writer's newsletter if you want that in your inbox. Otherwise, share this with your writing friends and I will see you next time. I promise it will be on time because I will actually have the microphone on. See you next week.