Moving from the Creative Flow to the Technical Edit (Guest Post)

You know how much we at The Novel Factory like processes and automating things that can be automated in order to save all that brainjuice for the most important (and fun) creative endeavours?

Well, we've found some kindred spirits over at ProWritingAid. These guys are experts when it comes to the technical edit.

Their app analyses your text and isolates where your writing might be improved for readability, fluency and accuracy

ProWriting Aid won’t find your plot holes or come up with that breathtaking metaphor you crave but it will find your overly complicated sentences, your weak verbs, your longwinded pages of backstory and so much more.

Pssst - use the code FACTORY to get 40% off the Premium version of ProWriting Aid (expires December 10th). Or you can just give it a go for free. 

I’ve asked the Editor of their blog, Lisa Lepki, to give us some pro-tips.  Here is what she said:

Moving from the Creative Flow to the Technical Edit

By Lisa Lepki

If you are reading this, it hopefully means that you have a completed first draft – hurrah!  That is way further than most aspiring authors ever get. Well done. 

Before you begin your first edit (and indeed all future edits), we recommend taking a couple weeks away from the text, so that when you come back to edit and redraft, you will be much more able to see what’s actually there rather than what you meant to get across.  

 

Start with English 101

There are several levels of technical writing improvements that you should look at.  You can begin with the ones you learned in English 101: proper use of punctuation, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, etc.  A basic spellcheck program in any word processor will find most of these errors. 

 

Next up: Readability Improvements

Readability improvements are slightly more complicated.  Often words and sentences should be changed, not because they are grammatically incorrect, but because they are not as clear or as strong as they could be.  This is to be expected when you have written a novel with your brain in full creative mode rather than editing mode.   Now is the time to go back and think about the specific words and structures and how they are getting your ideas across.  

Start with these 15 (yes, 15!) issues and your writing will be in much better shape when you give it to your beta reader or editor.  There are 20 ProWritingAid writing reports in total but we’ll ease you in with these first essential steps.

  

1.      Simplify your sticky sentences

This is my personal favorite report. A sticky sentence is one that is full of “glue words”, the 200 or so most common words in English: in, on, the, was, for, etc.  Glue words are the empty space that readers need to get through before they can get to your ideas.  Generally, your sentences should contain less than 45% glue words.  If they contain more, they should probably be re-written to increase clarity.  Let’s look at an example. 

Sticky: Dave walked over into the back yard of the school in order to see if there was a new bicycle that he could use in his class. (Glue index: 60.7%)

Clear: Dave checked the school’s back yard for a new bicycle to use in class.  (Glue index 42.8%)

The editing tool will find these sentences for you so that you can make them clearer.

 

2.      Check for repeats

Duplicating or repeating a word or phrase too quickly is an easy mistake to make.  If you’ve just used a word then it will be active in your mind and so you can easily use it again without even realizing.  Although it is easily done, it can be really difficult for you, as the writer, to spot.  An editing tool can search through your entire piece of writing and point out that you used the phrase “to her daughter” eight times, or “they set forth again” five times, so that you can rephrase some of those instances and keep your readers engaged. 

 

3.      Down with adverbs!

As Stephen King famously said “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”  Writers tend to use adverbs to modify a weak verb.  Where possible, it’s better to use a strong verb instead.  Look at these examples.  

Weak verb + adverb:       John ran quickly to school.

Strong verb:                       John sprinted to school.

Weak verb + adverb:      Kate spoke quietly to her daughter.

Strong verb:                       Kate whispered to her daughter.

Weak verb + adverb:      Peter stared angrily at Paul.

Strong verb:                       Peter glared at Paul. 

Writers often find a lot of adverbs in their first draft and that’s understandable.  This is a common writers’ problem. The editing tool will highlight every adverb in your text so you can reassess them.  We certainly don’t suggest that you remove ALL adverbs, sometimes they will be exactly right for what you are trying to get across.  But adverbs tend to be weak and, when you edit, your sentences will usually be more engaging if you re-write them using strong verbs. 

 

4.      Use the passive voice very carefully

This is one of those writing rules passed down by generations of writers: sentences written in the active voice tend to be more engaging for the reader.  

In an active sentence, the subject is at the start of the sentence and the ordering is SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT, e.g. Jane hit the ball.  In a passive sentence, the object is promoted to the start of the sentence, and the subject is relegated to the end, e.g. The ball was hit by Jane.

Like many of these rules, this does not mean that you must remove every occurrence – sometimes it works – but more often than not, you should rearrange your passive sentence to make it active, and therefore more effective.   

 

5.      Eliminate redundancies

You will be amazed at how often redundancies creep into your writing.  Redundant words make writing longer, not better.  Let’s look at some examples: 

The problems first began when Gary lost his job. 

The word began means “the first occurrence”, so the word first is redundant. 

Sam, Tom and Susie gathered together around the fire.

The word gathered means “to come together”, so the word together is redundant. 

An editing tool can search for hundreds of common redundant phrases so you can eliminate the clutter.

 

6.      Eliminate clichés

Whenever you use a cliché, you are knowingly writing something unoriginal.  George Orwell in his Rules of Writing said: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”.  Use your imagination to come up with something fresh.  A new analogy or metaphor will make much more of an impression on your readers than a dusty old cliché.

 

7.      Replace overused words

We often use words like just, then, knew, feel, it, there, and have when we speak, but if we want our writing to stand out, we need to not overuse them on the page.  (Again, this does not mean eliminate, just not overuse.)

When we are lacking inspiration, these are the words we fall back on.  When you run your writing through an editing app, you will probably find that the sections you struggled with will be a rainbow of highlighted overused words compared to those ones that had a good flow.  Go back to those sections and see if you can vary your word selection to make your writing more compelling. 

 

8.      De-tag your dialogue

This is one way to follow the “show, don’t tell” rule that has passed down from writer to writer.  Editors prefer minimal use of dialogue tags like said and replied.  Instead, try using the dialogue itself or the character’s action to carry emotion.  For example:

Original:  “You are not going,”  Mark said angrily.

Rewrite:  Mark thumped his fist on the desk. “You are not going and that’s final.”

In the second example, Mark’s anger was shown, not told, and no dialogue tags were needed.

 

9.      Add more transitions

Statistics show that published writing has a high occurrence of transitions: as many as one in every four sentences.  Transitions are the short phrases that draw relationships between the sentences in a text.  For example is a transition, as are likewise, similarly and thus. Transitions help organize your ideas, make your writing easy to follow and help form a cogent argument. Sections that have a low frequency of transitions may be difficult to follow and disjointed.  The editing tool will scan your writing and give you a transitions score.  If it’s low, you probably want to add a couple more to create better flow. 

 

10.  Be consistent

Maybe you are in England and you want to put a “u” into colour, labour, and neighbourhood.  That’s cool with us.  Maybe you are in America and you want to organize and analyze rather than organise and analyse like they do in the UK.  No problem.  What’s not OK, however, is if you are trying “to organise some neighborhood labour by analyzing the house colours”.  There are over 1,700 spelling differences between UK English and US English, with Canadian English sitting somewhere precariously between the two.  You need to decide if you are going to use US or UK spelling and then stick with it.  The app will find these inconsistencies and call you out on it. 

 

11.  Cut down on pronouns

When you are writing in creative mode, often you rely on pronouns to get your narrative across: He did this, She did that, They ran there, I found out.  Ideally, you should aim for a pronoun percentage of between 4% and 15%.  Any more than this and your writing can feel dull.  This is especially so with initial pronouns – those at the start of the sentence. Check your pronoun score and see if you can add more variety to your writing by replacing them with proper nouns or by rearranging the sentence.  

 

12.  Check your pace

Good writing contains faster-paced sections, such as dialogue and character action, as well as slower-paced sections, such as introspection and backstory.  Differently paced sections should complement each other, allowing the reader to move with you through the narrative.  A book that is entirely composed of car chases without taking the time to make you care about the character being chased just won’t be effective at bringing readers into the story.  Likewise, a story that has four chapters in a row dedicated to Zen contemplation may need a bit of action to keep readers interested.  The editing tool can highlight your slower-paced sections to make sure that your reader won’t get bogged down.  

 

13.  Watch out for overly long sentences

When you are on a writing roll, it is easy to accidentally write long, rambling, run-on sentences to get your characters from A to B.  Readers often get lost in a long sentence and have to go back to the beginning to make sense of it.  Every time they have to do that, they step outside of your world for a moment.  Some long sentences work beautifully, but more often than not, your clarity will increase if you split them into a more easily digestible size.

 

14.  Vary your sentence length

The average sentence length for most published writers is between 11 and 18 words. If your average is over that, your writing might feel overly verbose or complicated.  If your average is below that, your writing will likely feel choppy.  To maintain your readers’ interest, use a variety of sentence lengths: some short and punchy, others long and flowing.  An editing tool can give you a visual representation of your work so you can see where whether your sentence variety needs to be increased.  

 

15.  Vary your NLP Predicates

It’s important to use all five senses in your writing. Every writer has a tendency to favour one or two sense over the others, and this affects the way that he or she experiences the world, processes information and makes memories.  This means that we tend to describe characters, settings or actions using words related to our own senses.  Writing that skews too far toward one sense over the others will resonate more with readers who favour the same sense and less so with those who do not. Run your writing through the NLP Predicates report and make sure that you have all five senses covered. 

I know it seems like a lot, but if you take the time to check all of these elements, your writing will be stronger.  Plus, focusing on the technical side of things for a while gives your creative neurons a bit of a rest. When you go back and read your edited work, you will be better able to re-enter the creative mode and build on your narrative and character development. 

Happy editing!

ProWritingAid’s FREE version offers access to 20 writing reports.  Before
December 10th use code FACTORY to get 40% off the Premium version, which allows you to edit within the reports and gain access to MS Word and Google Docs add-ins.

Lisa Lepki is the Editor of the ProWritingAid blog. A word nerd, she loves the technical elements of writing almost as much as the writing itself. Her work can also be found on Writer’s Digest, Bookbaby.com, The Write Life, and DIYAuthor.