Tag: Reynold Akison

After about 100 pages of editing, my new Robert Champion crime novel Insure to Murder, I’m discovering that after about ten pages I start to get tired and have a hard time concentrating and making decisions about changes. I read every word and sentence looking for misspellings, errors in grammer and other language problems.

I also try to strenghten the prose and tighten up the meaning of a sentence if it sounds vague or fuzzy. I try to edit my work from the 30,000 foot point-of-view of the overall story beginning to end. Since I know the ending I can take out anything that might give away the ending.

There’s a lot of balls to keep in the air from the reuse of specific names for places like coffee shops and restaurants, to time lines of past events, to the sound of each character’s voice in the dialogue. It amounts to reimagining the story again.

If you write tell me about your experiences with editing, and/or send me any questions you have about the editing process.

I’ve just finished the first draft of a new Robert Champion crime novel called Insure to Murder. I’ve begun to run Word’s spell check on the 80,000 word novel. If you’ve ever spell-checked a long manuscript you soon discover that if left to its own devices MS Word would change enough of your language to make you look like even more of an idiot in print. It has real problems with the contraction “it’s” versus “its” along with the spelling and uses of “their” versus “there”.

Yet spellcheck does catch a lot grammar hiccups in my prose like noun-verb agreement that happen when I’ve gone back and made my next-day revisions of the previous day’s prose that I do before facing off with a new day’s blank screen (comparable to the often dreaded pre-computer-stone age blank 8 1/2 x 11 page).

I wonder if there’s a way to correct or teach spellcheck-grammarcheck besides the “add to the dictionary” command. I admit that option has been one of the most helpful over the years. Any thoughts on the matter?