Have you finished the first draft of your story, novella or novel? Then you’re ready to continue with our indispensable guide to becoming a Bestselling Author. This time we concentrate on aspects of proofreading and that initial editing process, which are Quite Crucial. They are also surprisingly absent from a number of books nowadays. It may be that the writer was busy that day and had to worm the cat. We don’t know. We do know that “In a whole in the ground their lived, a hobbit.” would not have helped J R R Tolkien’s chances much.

Once you have that first draft, there are a number of things to do. The first is to put it away for a few days (or even weeks), clear your mind a little and check if the cat really does need worming. No-one wants to take a vomiting cat to an award ceremony. Or a lurcher with the runs, for that matter. Never let your lurcher eat a cat that hasn’t been wormed.

After that, when you have met the vet’s bills by working as an illegal bricklayer for a month, you should go back and set aside time to examine three key aspects of your work.

1. Words

Did you use the right words? This is a big issue for the serious author. Look at the first draft of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

“It was an OK time, it was a dodgy time, it was the age of cleverness, it was. And the age of foolishness, come to think of it.”

See? Charlie was in the general zone, but he hadn’t quite got there. You need to review your draft, and tweak it where a word seems incongruous or doesn’t help the fulgent flowishness of the sentence. While you’re at it, check for words which are:

a) Out of their proper time – There are no known examples of cell-phones in literature from the American Civil War. Gothic horror is fine, but the electric drill wasn’t perfect until 1895, so don’t have a tortured Gothic heroine putting up pictures with one. Pay attention to expressions such as “Yo, blood!” and “Gadzooks!”, and make sure that they are used in the correct period.

Note, though, that the period feel you wanted is not best served by regurgitating endless historical words, however much they were in currency at the time. A little ‘quoth-ing’ goes a long way.

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: Even a decade or two makes a difference. Your children may wet themselves if you write Young Adult fiction using the ‘street’ language of your own youth. Don’t bother.

b) Unnecessarily clever – There is a difference between challenging your readers and making them buy a dictionary to get through your first page. Good ‘literary’ writers know when to give the reader a break and leave out the sequipedelian sussurances. You may build up to it over time, but it’s not usually a good idea to start this way. Try not to use words that sound like they should be in a high-class restaurant review for self-indulgent nobs. Or knobs.

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: Never use ‘ambience’ more than once in an entire novel. Or ‘jus’. Preferably don’t use them at all.

c) From the wrong language – Did you really mean to go all T S Eliot and Ezra Pound, putting in chunks of Greek, Latin, Chinese and Aramaic apparently at random, or are you just obsessed with your time at finishing school? There is probably a word in English for what you want to say, without borrowing stylish-sounding stuff from French all the time.

The only exception to this is German – German really does have a word for everything, even if it’s fourteen syllables long, and you might have to go there occasionally.

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: If you are a Greek, Latin, Chinese, Aramaic or French writer, you may skip the above. If you are a German writer, you’ve got it made.

d) From the wrong variant of a language – UK and American English are standard for many publications, but usually only one at a time. Don’t mix them. “Coloured aluminum siding” is wrong, as is “Colored aluminium cladding.” Regardless of your writing, in fact.  Remember to keep a separate bag of the letter ‘U’ to hand, adding or subtracting as necessary. Australian English should be left to experts.

Watch out for words which have different meanings altogether. When an American says that you have a chip on your shoulder about language, she means that you’ve left a thinly-sliced potato-based snack there. When she says that she’s going to take out the garbage, she means that she is going to assault you and leave you for dead. Or maybe that’s only in films.

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: Always think hard before saying that your character rode into town on his sister’s ass.

e) Over-qualified – It always looks jolly busy when every noun has at least one adjective, and every verb an adverb. But wait. Have you had to qualify your word because you used the wrong one in the first place? Have you surrounded your nouns and verbs with qualifiers because you found it easier than describing what you meant properly? Whilst weird literature is fond of eldritch, squamously dripping Cyclopean things of blasphemous enormity, someone may eventually spot that you are trying to increase your word count. If your characters are constantly saying things shrilly, coldly, angrily, moodily and reluctantly, you may have forgotten to give them the right dialogue. Just a thought.

2. Punctuation

Did you use; the right, punctuation? If you don’t know, try a standard punctuation guide like the Chicago Manual of Style. This was invented as part of the early meat-packing industry, and is therefore short and to the point. Or something like that.

Try to stick to one punctuation style throughout your work, unless you are an ‘experimental’ or ‘transgressive’ writer. In these cases, you can throw in << ** [ @ # ^] and all sorts of random punctuation just to see what happens. Your readers will assume you are cleverer than they are, and nominate you for things.

If you are a normal writer, you should see if proper use of punctuation helps make your sentences less interminably difficult to follow due to the extraordinary use of dependent sub-clauses which never seem to end (and indeed, have their own internal grammar and punctuation, which are suspect and yet may really be an expression of your inner style, waiting only to find an opportunity to spread its wings) – or even allow the reader to keep breathing if they were to try and, notwithstanding the nature of any audience other than the dog, read them out loud to give full vent to your muse (see What to do with Muses last time); so to speak. And rest.

Colons and semi-colons are problematic. You can get laxatives, but it may be better to steer clear of them until you know what they do. The humble comma will do for most things.

We cannot undertake to go into apostrophe’s at length here, as this is a complex subject and often misunderstood. There is a difference between the possessive apostrophe and the one which denotes that something is missing. Usually what is missing is an understanding of the use of possessive apostrophes (see also Spelling).

It is worth saying that exclamation marks become annoying after a while! Ellipses, whilst often over used, are great…

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: If-your-word-count-is-too-high-then-hyphenate-as-much-as-possible.

3. Spelling

Did you ever learn to spell? It seems astonishing in this day and age, but the average spellchecker programme is neither telepathic nor sensitive to the intricate subtleties of literature. It does not know the difference between ‘their’ and there’, for example.

It will notice when you fell asleep on the keyboard and typed ‘dcfvgb hnuikol’, but you probably saw that one. We hope. Unless you are creating linguistics for your seven volume fantasy series, in which case it means ‘that feeling you get when an elven assassin steps on your bunion’. There’s a German word for that as well.

Common error-pairs missed by spellcheckers (see also Punctuation) include –

• your: you’re
• its: it’s
• let’s: lets
• exposition: mind-numbing tedium

We won’t list any more, in case we get accused of being helpful. Whilst you may not want to send your readers to a dictionary, it is useful to have one yourself. Five speeling mistakes in the first sentence of your story will put people off, and is a common reason why a number of e-books get deleted from our tablet. If we had an app for throwing e-books at the wall, we would totally use it.

So you either have to be a very good speller, meticulous at double-checking, or shove your draft over to someone else who is. Sharing your newborn story with someone whose spelling is worse than yours may help in some areas of writing, such as plot, characterisation and level of creativity, but not in this one.

The Cynical Writer’s Tip: If you do use a spellchecker, remember to set it to the language in which you’re writing. Otherwise you get an astonishing number of squiggly underlines.

You can find Part One here, by the way:

how to be a bestselling author

Next time: Beta-Readers, Proper Editing and Other Nuisances

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That’s it for today. We’re probably due a midweek medley soon, and we have some cracking interviews being set up with cool authors and publishers for the Summer. Sign up to greydogtales, and embrace the weird…

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