My writing setup Part 2: Editing
Illustration by Tim Martin
Congratulations, you may now have now written the first draft of your novel. If you are like me, you will now need to spend a long time revising your text. You will pick up grammar and style errors, as well as those passages that are so bad you wonder if Gremlins had interfered and inserted your weekly shopping list. “Can I have three bananas, two tins of beans, and a loaf of sliced white, please?” he asked, before realising there were only forty-five minutes to save the Earth.
In an earlier post, where my imaginary friend, Eric (IE), interviewed me, I discussed my writing set-up. In this post, Eric asks me questions about my editing process.
The interview: Part 2
Illustration by Tim Martin
IE: Hello. Last time we spoke, we discussed the apps you used for notes, plotting, and writing your draft manuscript. What are you up to now?
“Hello, my imaginary friend. Yes, I enjoyed our chat. I hope you got something from it?”
IE: Well, no, not really. I'm imaginary. Anyway, for the folks reading this, you talked about editing. What's that all about?
“However much you may plot your story, when writing 80,000+ words, there will be errors.”
IE: Yeah, so use spellcheck and the underlined thingy the software shows you. What's all the fuss?
“It's never quite as simple as that. You are right, there is a spellcheck. Then there is word check. You know, like when the word is spelt correctly, but it is the wrong word. You have to check for homophones. Something like their, there, and they’re is a good example. You have to check your punctuation, and you have to check your grammar.”
IE: Right. Is that it?
“No, there's more.”
IE: Oh, Jesus. Really?
“Yes. You need to check for all sorts of things. Overuse of adverbs, sentence length, whether a sentence is difficult to read. Then there are dialogue tags. Things like he or she said. Separating dialogue into different paragraphs when different characters speak. Oh, and passive voice.”
IE: What’s passive voice? Am I a passive voice?
“No, you are imaginary, definitely not passive. Here's an example. Tim was interviewed by imaginary Eric, is passive. Imaginary Eric interviewed Tim is active. Active is better.”
IE: Oh, thanks. Anything else?
“Yes. Continuity. In one of my books, I describe a character wearing a red dress. Within a couple of paragraphs, I had them in a green dress. I had to pick one colour and stick with it.”
IE: Right, so what tools and techniques do you use?
“It differs. I use different tools for different things and different types of writing. The main tools I use are LanguageTool (inside Ulysses), Hemingway Editor, and ProWritingAid.
If I am writing a blog post, I would use Ulysses’s revision mode, and Hemingway editor. Once I finish the revision mode check, I copy the text and then paste it into the Hemingway Editor to check sentence structure and readability.”
IE: What about novels?
“That’s different. First, I dictate the text to Ulysses and so it acts like the first edit. There is nothing like reading your work out loud to see if sentences make sense. It also helps to check the dialogue sounds realistic.
Next is a read-through for continuity. I export the manuscript as a PDF, read it, and make notes on it in Noteful. The third round of edits is in Ulysses and revision mode. Fourth is Hemingway. The last step is to copy and paste the text into ProWritingAid.
ProWritingAid is better for fiction because you can define the type of writing you are doing. It will give different responses for technical or creative writing.
Once that is done, I export the whole manuscript to a PDF and give it another read.”
IE: Your books are over 80,000 words. Are you telling me you go through the whole thing six times?
“Yep. That's right. It's a lot.”
IE: Geez. Do you still find errors after that?
“Yes. Lots of the apps use some form of AI to analyse the text. It can be easy to say fix this thing, then find the words are off. This happens a lot with dialogue. The AI wants to fix it to make it proper, but not everyone speaks like a middle-class bloke from 1950, so I have to fix it.”
IE: You must love doing this to put yourself through it.
“I do love it. Editing gets in the way of writing, but it is a necessary thing. I want the story to be as good as it can be before I ask others to read it. I don't want to spoil their enjoyment with bad grammar or continuity issues.”
IE: Great. You do you. I'm going back to somewhere in your brain where I can disappear.
“You also wanted to know about my illustrations. You know the apps I use.”
IE: Yep, but that can wait. I'll see you next time.
The list of things
If you want to follow along, why not sign up for my newsletter, where I will summarise what I have learned or done. I’ll produce something once per month, and I promise I won’t spam your mailbox.
If you fancy reaching out (to Tim or imaginary Eric), why not contact me.