My Personal Editing Checklist Every Novelist Should Read, Save, & Read Again
Full disclosure.
This is a new and improved version of the checklist that I send to those that sign up for my email list, but I figured, even if you’re not interested in being on my email list, you should be able to get value out of it too.
So here is the checklist.
Are Your Characters Full and Real People?
If I asked you to picture your characters in your head, how much detail could you muster up? What’s below their nails? Are their pubes trimmed? Why or why not?
When you compare two character’s speech, can you tell who is talking by the words that they are saying?
Do you know more about the characters than appears on the page?
Do you have two characters that are fulfilling the same role?
You’ve heard it before, but you’ll hear it again: show don’t tell
Look back over a scene or chapter that introduces one or more characters. How much time, if any, have you spent describing the characters’ character? Are you telling us about characteristics that will later show up in dialogue and action? Are you repeating yourself?
What about character histories? Have you developed your characters’ childhoods in detail, on the page, and can they be cut?
What information (technical details, histories, backgrounds on locations or families) do your readers need in order to understand your story? At what point in the story do they need to know it?
How are you getting this information across to your readers? Have you given it to them all at once through a short writer-to-reader lecture? Have you bluntly told the reader? Have you created a scene that aptly shows them this important personality trait or character relationship?
If exposition comes out through your dialogue, is it dialogue would actually speak even if your readers didn’t have to know the information? In other words, does the dialogue exist only to put the information across? If it does, think of a scene that could show this information, instead.
What scenes are better off told instead of shown? What scenes need quick, fast-paced exposition to get through?
Are there important character traits or plot details that would be better off as a stand alone scene then a one paragraph exposition?
The Reader’s Point Of view
Which point of view are you using and do you know why you chose that POV? Is there a better POV suited for the goal of your piece. For example, with first person limited, magical realism is near impossible to do, because the narrator becomes unreliable.
Do you move from head to head? Would your story gain power if you stuck with a single viewpoint? Should you break your differing POVs into different chapters?
If you’re jumping between POVs, does your language change with the POV adjustment? If not, should it?
Look at your descriptions. Can you tell how your viewpoint character feels about what you’re describing?
Spacing, Proportion, And Subplots:
Take a look at your descriptions. Are the details you give the ones your viewpoint character would notice? Are they important? What’s the least amount of details you could give to explain a scene, a character, or an idea?
Reread your first fifty pages. What do you mostly spend your time on? Are the characters you develop most fully important to the ending? Do you use the locations you develop in detail later in the story? Do any of the characters play a surprising role in the ending? Could readers guess this from the amount of time you spend on them? Have you given anything away already?
Do you go on meandering tangents — little subplots or descriptions that don’t advance the plot? If so, are they effective? If you don’t have any, should you add some?
Are you writing about your favourite topics or hobbies? Do you give unnecessary weight to the things you love while ignoring the topics you don’t enjoy?
Good Dialogue:
Check your dialogue for explanations. Take a highlighter and mark every place where an emotion is mentioned outside of dialogue. Chances are, most of your highlights are explanations of a character’s emotions or of some other on-the-nose explanation.
Cut the explanations. Better? Worse? If it’s worse, then start rewriting the surrounding dialogue too. Ask yourself what the purpose of this conversation is.
Mark every -ly adverb (I like to use command + f to find them). How many of them do you have? How many of them are based on adjectives describing an emotion (nonchalantly, shyly, morosely, furiously and so on)? You can probably do without most of them, though perhaps not all. Be critical.
Do you have physically impossible speaker attributions? “Hello,” he snarled. “Goodbye,” he winked. Do you use any speaker attribution verbs other than said? Remember, though there are occasional exceptions, even innocuous verbs like replied or answered lack the unobtrusiveness of said. The point, 99.99% of the time, is to seamlessly tell the reader who is speaking.
Can you get rid of some of your speaker attributions entirely? Drop them and see if it’s still clear who is speaking. Or try replacing some of them with physical beats within the scene.
Don’t start a paragraph with a speaker attribution, but instead add it in in the first natural pause (where a period would go).
Name before noun (Renni said) rather than other way around (said Renni) because when you run into pronouns (he said) you want to be consistent.
Have you referred to a character more than one way in the same scene? For example, referring to him by his first name in one sentence, then his last name in the next? Don’t confuse your reader. Stay consistent.
When a speaker pauses to think, you use an ellipsis (…), but when they are are interrupted you use an M-dash ( — ). You can create an M dash using “command + shift -”
How often do you paragraph your dialogue? Are there large blocks of talking? Try adding a little more back and forth, with more paragraphs, and see how it reads.
Is your dialogue too polished? Try adding more contractions, fragments and run on sentences.
Is some of your stiff dialogue, where characters tell each other exactly how they feel, really exposition in disguise? Is there a scene that would perform this exposition better?
Do your characters ever lie or mislead one another? Is it possible for them do it accidentally?
Are you using a lot of unusual spelling and forcing a dialect? If you re-write your dialect with standard spelling, does it still read like dialect? Be aware that dialect can annoy your reader after a while.
Read It All Out Loud And See How It All Sounds
Read your dialogue out loud. Read your narration out loud. Read every word you’ve written out loud.
Another nifty trick is to use your word processor’s text to speech to have it read it out loud for you.
When the impulse to change anything arises, change it. Your intuition is often correct.
Talking To Ourselves (And The Reader):
How much interior dialogue do you have? Go through and highlight every passage that occurs in someone’s head.
Is your interior monologue actually dialogue description in disguise? Are you using interior monologue to show things that should be told? Should some of your longer passages be turned into scenes, so that the reader can be shown them, instead of told through interior monologue. Would this be more effective?
Do you use thinker attributions? Can you remove these simply by rewriting it into third person, putting it into its own paragraph, or using italics?
Does your POV mechanics allow for thinker attributions?
Breaking Up Your In-Scene Beats
Small explanation, because beats can mean different things to different people, but beats in this context is the action interspersed throughout a conversation.
How many beats do you have in a given conversation? Are you interrupting what should be a tense and gripping situation with fluffy beats?
What are your beats describing? Familiar everyday actions, such as dialing a telephone or buying groceries? How often do you repeat a beat? Are your beats cliche? Is everyone lighting a cigarette?
Do your beats help illuminate your characters? Are they individual or general actions anyone might do under any circumstances? Is there something you could do that is a trait of your character, or that adds more to your character’s personality? Tell us something!
Do your beats fit the rhythm of your dialogue? Read it aloud (again and again!) and find out.
Basic Balance Is Best:
Flip through the pages of your book without evening reading it — notice the black and white space and how they fit together. Do you have pages of single paragraphs? Do you have pages and pages of dialogue? Does it feel balanced to you?
If one of your scenes seems to drag on and on and on, break it up into smaller paragraphs and see what you can cut.
Do you have scenes with no long paragraphs? Remember, what you’re after is balance. Chapters should (generally) be a mixture of short paragraphs, long paragraphs, dialogue, and exposition.
Have your characters made long, uninterrupted speeches spanning pages upon pages to one another? Consider cutting these up.
Are all your scenes or chapters exactly the same length? Do you generally have the same size chapters? Try making some shorter and some longer.
One Character, One Goal, One Purpose, One Time
Ask yourself what you’re trying to do with each character, each paragraph, each scene, each chapter, and the book, overall. How many times do you repeat the same emotion, or purpose? How many can you cut?
Look for the weakest approaches and cut those.
If you hold some chapters up side by side, do any accomplish the same thing. For example, do 2 chapters both express the same emotional character trait? Which was worse? Which was better?
As they say, “kill your darlings.” Is there a plot device or technique that you love, but overuse?
Are your villains only villainous in a single way? Could they be more complex? Could a reader identify with any of their characteristics?
As I said earlier, keep on lookout for words you repeat. The more striking the word, the more a person will remember you used it before. For example, I use “precipice” too often, and always remove unnecessary ones (anything more than once) from my short stories or novels.
The Marks Of A New Or Unsophisticated Writers
How many -ing and as phrases do you write? Do you often use a construction like “he was -ing verb” instead of “he verbed” → He was running to the store. He ran to the store.
What about -ly adverbs? Command F again!
Do you have a lot of short sentences, both within your dialogue and within your description and narration? Remember to balance! Try keeping some sort and stringing others along with commas. I often get into a rhythm of short, long, medium sentences.
Do you use a lot of italics or explanation points! Let the words speak for themselves.
How much of your sex scenes do you leave to your readers’ imagination? What about violence? Are either gratuitous just for gratuitous’ sake.
Do your characters swear a lot? Do you use obscenities as stand ins for personalities? Does it add or detract from your story?
That’s it (for now!) — I’ll keep adding to this list until I’m an old man.
