Editing Your Fiction Checklist by Michael Seidman

Editing Your Fiction Checklist by Michael Seidman

• Is your novel right for the market to which you want to sell it?
• If you’re taking risks, have you maintained the form of the category, even if you’re ignoring the formula?
• Is the language appropriate to your market?
• Have you created minor characters and subplots?
• Do you spend too many time on them, distracting the reader from the main story?
• Do you spend too little time on them? If they’re not important to the story, should they be removed?
• Are you showing, and not telling?
• Do your characters express their feelings, or do you tell us what they are?
• Do you let your characters and their actions tell the story, or are you stopping to bring the reader up to speed?
• Are your characters as clear to the reader as they are to you? Have you maintained their character in dialogue and in actions?
• Are all the motivations clear to the reader, or are things happening because you need them to?
• Have you spent too much time giving the reader the characters’ biographies? At the same time, does the reader know enough about the characters?
• Are characters telling each other stories simply as a way of giving the reader information? (If a character says to another, “Well, you know Billy did this…,” the conversation shouldn’t be taking place.)
• Do character descriptions come naturally, in the course of dialogue or action?
• Are you describing people in terms of icons or idols? Will enough of your readers know what Michael Stipe looks like?
• Have you offered full descriptions (naturally) of your major players? There’s nothing more aggravating than have a series of characters through the novel introduced by one or two features. It might work once, but by the time we get to the third or fourth “he was a tall man with reddish hair and a brusque voice,” it becomes an annoying pattern.
• Speaking of iconic descriptions, does your manuscript read like the advertising pages of a magazine, with a product plug on every page? Does it matter than the stereo’s an Aiwa rather than a Sony? (It does matter if it’s one of the really high priced systems. It tells us something about the character.) Same with most cars, clothes and other products. Unless the brand is telling detail, leave it out.
• Is interior monologue realistic? Are they thoughts the character would actually have?
• What point of view have you chosen? Why?
• Have you maintained the point of view throughout each scene, or jumped into another character’s head in the middle of events?
• If you’re writing in first person, is this someone the reader will want to spend time with?
• Unless you’re writing in an omniscient point of view, have you made sure your first-person character does not learn things in the course of the story that the reader didn’t become aware of at the same time. (This refers to information; interpretation of the information does not have to be revealed until you’re ready.)
• Is your point-of-view character clear from the beginning? If there are shifts, do you make the new point of view obvious soon enough?
• Is narrative in each scene true to the character seeing it? A man and a woman won’t see the same room in the same way; they’ll describe people differently.
• Have you avoided editorializing, commenting or events in your voice rather than that of the characters?
• Does your dialogue say what you want it to say?
• Are your conversations serving any purpose at all? Are they serving more than one purpose: describing things, adding to character developing, expressing ideas important to the story?
• Does your dialogue stand on its own? If you cut explanations, dialogue tags, and anything else used as a crutch to support the words, does the conversation still hold up, saying what you want it to? If not, change the dialogue, not the tags.
• Do adverbs follow quotation marks? This means the dialogue or scene does not express what you said.
• Does your punctuation work as part of conversation? A dash represents an interruption; an ellipsis, a pause or gap.
• Is there any action interspersed through the conversations, or is the dialogue, unnaturally, only words?
• Are your characters giving speeches or actually talking to each other?
• Have you used dialogue to show off your research, allowing characters to give detailed explanations of things that do not make a difference to the story? (We don’t need the principles of rocketry to accept space flight.)
• Do the conversations sound natural? Read your work aloud; even better, have someone read it to you. Does the exposition flow easily or does the reader have to stop, either to catch her breath or figure out pronunciation?
• Have you used contractions, slang, idioms and regionalisms both to ease reading and to give a sense of character and place?
• Does your dialect disrupt the reading? Can you achieve the sense of place without “creative” spelling?
• What does your manuscript look like? Are there unrelieved blocks of text? Can any of your paragraphs be broken into shorter ones? Long paragraphs can also be broken up with dialogue. It helps the pace and also makes the manuscript (and the printed page in the book) easier to read. As in life, sometimes we’re judged by how we look; if a page appears intimidating, the reader is going to be intimidated.
• Does your dialogue look like long paragraphs? Can the talk be broken up by action?
• Are you repeating words, phrases, bits of business because you like them too much or because it was easier to just go with what you know rather than create something new?
• Have you looked at every word, making certain it is the only right word?
• Have you checked for anachronisms, words that weren’t in use at the time the novel is set, products and events that are out of time, if not out of place?
• Have you used adverbs and adjectives sparingly? Like italics and exclamation points, these modifiers are fine seasonings and have to be used delicately.
• Are you using trendy words for effect… or through habit?
• Have you used “which” incorrectly? Go on a “which” hunt. Nine times out of ten, the word should be “that.”
• Have you turned to the dictionary to check spelling and definitions, or simply trusted instinct and a computer program?
• Is your thesaurus near you as you work? Is it well thumbed?
• Did you chart your characters and story lines, to be certain that neither disappears inexplicably?
• Are details all the same at the end of the manuscript as they were at the beginning? Continuity counts, whether it concerns eye color, clothing or reaction to events. If you’re working on a series, continuity still counts. Has your character been injured, had an epiphany, taken a lover? Anything that’s happened has an effect on the character in the next adventure.
• Have you done your fact checking? If you’re writing with freedom, you’re going to have some details wrong: distances, historical facts, a multitude of problems. With the work finished, and research no longer something to be done to avoid writing, check. Get the details you may have missed. No one has to know how much research was done.
• Did you make notes as you read, marking the manuscript, so that when you begin to retype, you know what you have to do? Are you going to do it? When?