Member-only story
Teenage Kicks
Ten Months to Publication: 5 Ways to Check Your Own Writing
Typos, missing words and more
You’ve sent a first draft of your first three chapters out. You’ve written a synopsis. You are constantly refreshing your email for responses from agents and publishers.
In the background, there is a full manuscript lingering unedited. You might check your work as you go. You might spend hours on a single sentence. Or you might just download words into a dirty first draft.
But you haven’t edited your novel until you have checked the whole document. Agents and publishers will perform some kind of edit on your manuscript — different writers require different levels of editing.
Buttoning up the coat
When my children were small and setting off for primary school, I kept a hairbrush by the door. I would stand them in a line and brush their hair and button their coat before they left the house.
The same goes for a novel. Before the full manuscript leaves you, tidy up its appearance. I am not talking structural edits here. I am talking about typos, missing words and punctuation.
It’s arrived!
Finally, one day, it arrives. That fabled email that tells you an agent or publisher love the beginning of your story and would like to read the rest. It’s the request for ‘a full’. This is a great sign that your novel has potential. It’s getting noticed. You want it to be the best it possibly can on the day.
Here are 5 ways I check my whole novel before I send out a full manuscript:
1. Listen to it
Listening to your novel will make it very clear if it flows or now. You will hear the gaps where missing words should be and hear any misspellings.
I use the MS Word ‘Read Aloud’ function. I listen via my laptop the first time so I can catch any obvious errors immediately. I have a checking process I go through, detailed below, and when that is done I listen again without my laptop.
The first listen is to catch errors, the second listen is to make sure it flows and make a note of any areas that need rewriting or…
