Editing:- With the stroke of a pen…

The first draft is written and printed and now comes editing.

Completed first draft

The offending weapon;-  The Red Pen

I have a box of these pens standing by and am willing to use them with impunity. 

Editing is an important process in producing a novel.

Sentences and paragraphs invariably need tidying up, overused words removed or changed, my thesaurus comes in handy here.

Clichés need rooting out but beware; these can be useful in dialog.

(We’ll discuss this in another blog). 

The Red Pen in action

Sentences can be moved around to make words flow better and I often find that active verbs can add a bit of pace to a dull collection of words.  I can spend quite a lot of time agonising over the arrangement of a sentence just to change it back again on another read through.

A heavily edited page showing the demise of a whole paragraph

It is important to ensure that each word flows off the page.  The pace of the story changes throughout the novel, for example, and exciting piece full of action needs to flow very quickly as readers tend to read these passages faster.

More editing

All this and more can be achieved by careful editing.

Write without fear

Edit without mercy