Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Just How Should You Edit Your Novel?

Book editing is usually a matter about which there are numerous varied opinions. Many writers rely on editing as they write, and others decide to hold off until they've completed a draft before going back over the entire thing and working out where all their mistakes lie. It's not a clear-cut subject. There's naturally a variety of ways of carrying out the task of manuscript editing, and there's no wrong or right solution - providing what you choose to do works for you, why would you change it?

Having said that, while everybody's got their own personal suggestions on how and when and exactly how much to edit, if you aren't intending to hire someone to look after the book proofreading and you're planning to edit your work by yourself, there are various common challenges during the editing process it'll help to understand.

As an example, one element of novel editing has got to refer to the story. If you hire an experienced editor, their edit of your story might not be as in-depth as a complete critique, but it should still provide you with a review of the story and just how well it actually works. It would pinpoint any key issues which prevent your storyline from making sense, for example, or inconsistencies which really need to be sorted out.

A further part of novel editing concerns the style of your writing. The consistency is yet again a key issue here; the vast majority of writers write in a particular style, which should remain all the way through your novel (unless you have justification for some sort of style switch - you will always find exceptions to just about every rule!).

After that we get to the matter of things such as spelling and proper punctuation - the bare bones of your content. For instance, whenever editing your novel, you shouldn't just be looking to correct any mistakes in spelling or grammar, it's also sensible to perform a more extensive review to be sure your meaning is perfectly clear. The task of an editor can often be to examine a certain part of your novel and determine if it is as clear as it might be. And, if it isn't obvious enough, how could this be improved?

As a result, it's not hard to see that novel editing comes with a variety of issues, from the general storyline to the particular structure of man or women sentences. This means that it is a skilled task which calls for the right amount of attention and time in order to get it right. Novel editing is one thing which almost all authors have to do , but once you have got as far as you can with your own editing, it can be beneficial to employ a professional editor to look at your work once more.

After all, we tend to overlook things in our own work, and a different pair of eyes can pick up completely different issues and give you a professional opinion on how your novel works overall. This can be a particularly useful process to engage in if you're hoping to publish your novel, seeing that a well-edited novel is far more likely to appeal to a publisher when compared to a book which is sloppy and filled with inconsistencies.

So, although novel editing is clearly something that is personal to all writers, it is also something that pretty much all writers have to do. Refining your editing is a vital task to help you to enhance your writing.

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