There are some amazing tools designed to help fiction authors edit. Fiction authors can use scene maps, timelines, and character sheets to organize their books. I will post links to a lot of these tools on the 20K page.
With these additional tools, you can check how a scene is supposed to play out before you read it in your draft. You can check that each scene has internal and external continuity. You can track the pacing and ensure that the book follows your timeline.
With these different tools, you can check track your characters and ensure that the flow of the story makes sense.
There aren't as many specialized tools and techniques for nonfiction, so I have developed an approach from scratch. During this first rewrite, I focus on structure. I always reorganize my chapters a few times; the order that worked for the mind map doesn't work for the final book.
Sometimes I find that a section exploded. In editing this book, some of my five-hundred-word sections ballooned into three thousand when I was dictating. During the first rewrite, I broke them into manageable pieces. Some of these sections even turned into chapters. You can't always predict where your book will go when you are writing that first outline.
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Loops and Promises
A powerful writing technique is called loops or callbacks. There are a few different names for this valuable technique. These loops force people to read the entire book and keep them engaged all the way through the end.
The perfect example is the book that opens with an action scene and then rewinds to start the story a week earlier. To find out how that scene ends, the reader must work their way through the entire book.
My books are filled with loops that I open at the start of the book and close near the end. Each time I said, "I'll cover this a bit later," I was opening a loop with you. It's an excellent way to let you know there is more awesome content as long as you keep reading.
This book is filled with a massive number of promises. How many different pieces of content, images, and links did I say would be on the 20K page? Did I promise to include something later in the book? Did I promise to explain something via email?
During this first phase, create a tracking sheet of every loop you open and promise you make. I reorder my chapters a lot, and this can move the close of the loop in front of the opening. When this happens, I need to adjust that promise, or it will be weird for the reader.
How strange would it be if I promised to talk about dictation in the next chapter? I already talked about dictation, but maybe in the original order the dictation section came after the editing chapters. Changing your chapter order risks continuity mistakes. During this stage, make sure that your book flows correctly and adapt to any chapters you move around.
Once you have a list of promises and loops, check to make sure that you complete them. I have a big list of things to add to the 20K page right now. Sometimes I make a promise in a book and then forget about it. Only by keeping a separate list do I ensure that I meet my obligations to every reader.
When you are taking time off between finishing your rough draft and editing, you can work on your promises. When I take my break from writing this book, I will work on the 20K page. I'm using my time productively while allowing my brain to recalibrate.
Often I will ask a friend, customer or intern to go through my book and make a big list of promises. This is a win for both of us. They get early access to my book, and they are far more likely to notice every promise and loop. You don't need a professional editor to make this list; anybody who likes your work can do it.
For many authors, the story ends on the final page of the book. Once they write that page, they can wipe their hands at the end of a job well done. I don't see books that way. When I write a book, that is just the beginning. I want to go beyond our current relationship. I want you to be more than just a reader of this book.
I created the 20K page to encourage you to form a relationship with me; to see us as long-term partners that can work together to make your dreams come true. I want you to email me, follow me on social media and comment on my blog posts. The more we interact, the better. That's why I created the 20K page with so much additional content.
Filling your book with links doesn't benefit the reader or the writer. Trying to upload my pictures of the double rainbow into Kindle format would give you a weaker experience. Would you enjoy a low-resolution, black and white photograph of a rainbow? How annoying is it when you see a link in a book and have to find that link later and write it by hand into your browser?
Providing a secondary location with all your images, videos, bonus content and links is a benefit to your reader. They don't have to try and remember every link you mention. You know that any link or product I mention can be found at ServeNoMaster.com/20k. You only have to remember one link to find all that information; that's easy.
As you visit that page and interact with my website and free content, we will develop a stronger relationship. I love when people send in questions about chapters or point out mistakes in my books. They give me great ways to improve my books for the next readers.
I want to continue to improve my content, and the only way to do that is by connecting with the audience. I fill my books with promises to encourage that connection.
The promise page for Serve No Master is nearly ten thousand words. It's ten percent the length of the entire book. That's a massive amount of bonus content. I made a lot of promises in that book, and it took that many words to keep them.
In each of my books, I make different promises. Each book has a unique page to keep all those promises, and it's critical that I don't miss any. Every promise must be kept, and every loop must be closed. This provides both logical consistency and integrity.
Don't think that this step is only for nonfiction writers. Have you ever watched a movie where a character had two scenes and then seemed to walk off the set of the film? Something happened with a character, and you couldn't wait to see where that story was going? Fiction stories can leave open loops and broken promises as well.
With our list of promises and a rough draft, we have what we need to move on to the next step. You can go back and forth between your book and the promise page, or you can do them separately. Either technique works fine.
Once I finish this step, I'm ready to start using tools to edit.
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Action Steps
Take a break after finishing your book. Read another book and take enough time off to reset your palate.
Organize all of your editing tools and resources, from mind maps to character sheets.
Reorganize your chapters to improve the flow and structure of your book.
Make a “loops and promises” sheet. Check that you close every loop and fulfil every promise.
Start building a promise page to encourage your readers to visit your website and forge a relationship with you.
Part XXIX
Editing Stage Two - Grammarly
A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'
- A.P. Martinich
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The First Tool
The first tool in my editing process is Grammarly. I love this piece of software and could write an entire book on how it has changed my life as a writer. I have already written a six-thousand-word review of Grammarly on my blog. Allow me to share some of the highlights here.
Grammarly is an editor that lives inside your computer. It catches many of the mistakes that my line editor finds - long sentences, repeated phrases, and boring structures. I can upload my entire book as a Word document and work through a Grammarly edit in a few hours.
With Scrivener, I copy and paste each section into the Grammarly app and edit one small section at a time. Depending on how much I'm rewriting while I edit, I will use one technique or the other.
This amazing software catches a lot of the mistakes that I miss and has improved the quality of my writing. Every week Grammarly sends a report letting me know that
I'm in the top one percent of users. It makes me feel pretty good to know that Grammarly is impressed with my work. There is a massive review on my website where I show a ton of secret tips and tricks I have used to become a Grammarly power user.
Grammarly is one of the best tools in my writing arsenal. In less than a year I have run over one million words through it. I use it every single day for my business, and I can't praise it enough. This one piece of software will revolutionize your editing process.
Grammarly is a life saver and catches ninety percent of the errors that a good line editor would find. You can save a lot of money on editors when your book has far fewer errors.
Grammarly is awesome, but it is not a replacement for a human editor; it will never catch one hundred percent of the mistakes. Grammarly isn't perfect and doesn't realize that some misspellings are intentional. Sometimes I am being artistic or using a particular spelling for a reason. Occasionally it gets caught in a loop and keeps recommending I change two words back and forth infinitely.
In Breaking Orbit, I give a search result example, and the results were all lower-case, but Grammarly fought me on that. If you're using an example with a misspelled word or quote, Grammarly might not understand.
It might not be perfect, but it's very, very effective. It will catch the majority of your mistakes, and as you're going through an editing session, Grammarly catches your new mistakes on the fly.
Grammarly is like having a helpful assistant or a loyal dog at my side. It's helpful and speeds up the editing process. It even notices when my writing starts to become boring. I prefer to edit and rewrite my rough draft inside Grammarly, killing two birds with one stone.
Don't try to take a dictation file from Dragon and shove it into Grammarly. It doesn't work; I tried. You can't use Grammarly to bypass the cleanup phase, unfortunately.
You can use the free version of Grammarly to create a pretty solid book; however, if you are serious about your writing career, it is worth upgrading to the pro version. When you're generating the volume of a 20K System writer, you will more than get your money's worth. When you run a book through a full Grammarly edit, you can protect your book from a "kiss of death" review.
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Action Steps
Read my entire Grammarly review on my website. There is a link on the 20K page.
Use the link on my website to get the free version of Grammarly.
Run a test chapter through Grammarly to get a feel for how it works and do see how it jives with your writing style.
When you complete your next book, upgrade to the pro version and protect yourself from bad reviews.
Part XXX
Editing Stage Three - Big Picture
Filmmaking is not about the tiny details. It's about the big picture.
- Ed Wood
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Consistency
It is tempting to skip around between editing stages, but please resist that temptation. If you stay the course and follow the 20K Editing process, everything will be much quicker. The 20K Editing System is the fastest way to inoculate your book against negative reviews.
After your first run through Grammarly, you will have a much better rough draft. The rough edges are smoother, and a lot of simple mistakes are gone. Since we write with spellcheck turned off, Grammarly catches all those errors that would have slowed you down in the writing phase.
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Maintain the Flow
It is now time for the second stage of line editing, where we look for significant changes or shifts in the book. Grammarly is not going to catch it if I'm inconsistent in one of my promises or if my flow goes off course.
It's also not going to catch it if one of your characters changes genders or political affiliations. Or you change the name from the Tenth Fleet to the Earth Fleet. These little mistakes are obvious to humans, but software won't notice them.
Do a big picture read and look for character shifts. Look for a character doing something strange and changing motivation.
If you've ever seen the movie Pet Sematary II, you might remember the character Eddie. He is a good guy for most of the film, becomes a villain for twenty minutes and then becomes good again at the end. But there is never any explanation for these character shifts.
These motivational changes happen frequently. A character is good for most of the movie, and then suddenly they become a bad guy. I just read a book where a character went through a massive change at the very end. It was a great book until the final two pages. Without those two pages, it would have been a five-star book. But the ending was so bad it knocked the book down two full stars. Now, I didn't leave a three-star review because that's monstrous. I wouldn't do it to anyone. For the first time in ages, I couldn't leave a review because the ending was so disappointing. On the last page of the book, the secondary character goes, “Surprise; I've been pretending the whole time.”
I felt like the character pulled off one of those Mission Impossible masks in the very last scene. He shouts out a new motivation, and it's not consistent with any of his decisions earlier in the book. Every single action up until that point became discontinuous.
This is the type of mistake that you need to catch during this stage.
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Bootstrap Editing
Most new authors can't afford a line editor. They are pretty expensive and take a long time. Can you afford to lose two months of book sales and pay someone a massive amount of money? Probably not.
I don't want to give all my profits to someone else. More than a few editors have offered to work with me for thousands of dollars. That's not a road I will ever go down. These editors are preying on new authors who have no idea what they are doing.
They are looking for writers who have money from a retirement fund or nice savings account they can raid. These writers think they need a great editor to make it in the writing game and they get taken to the cleaners. Unfortunately, they pay these exorbitant prices without knowing better, and they spend money that they will never recover.
People who don't use a balance sheet for their writing career end up overpaying for these editors and other processes. There are plenty of small publishing houses that do the same thing to new authors, and I don't approve it any of it.
I certainly don't want to diminish the value of an editor, and if an editor is going to take six weeks to do something, then, of course, they have to earn six weeks of money.
But most editors are just going to throw your book into Grammarly and spend a few days on your book. You have to make your own decision balancing the costs and the benefits, but I only use editors sparingly.
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Find and Replace
Some mistakes will need to be fixed throughout your book. You might change a character name, and rather than change that name over and over, we can be strategic. Any time you notice a mistake that you'll have to fix a few times, just add it to a special list. Now is the time to deal with that list.
I can't remember the name of this book. It is either going to be 20K a Day or 20K in a Day. That little 'in' doesn't make much of a difference, but I'll look like an idiot if I don't fix that before I release the book.
When I'm going through this edit, I type "20K" in the search bar and every time I use that phrase will come up. This will allow me to check that I am consistent about capitalizing the S in 20K System as well.
Some of your changes might affect the physics within your book. If you alter the rules of magic in the final chapter, you need to go back through and correct that continuity error. Trying to fix this type of problem in the middle of your early edits will be a hassle. You can easily miss a spot. Now is the time to go back in and fix any errors from your little list of discontinuities.
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One Character at a Time
Once you have completed your list, go through your draft and make each of those changes. This is a great time to double-check all your scientific references and organize your links.
Whe
n writing fiction, you can easily find all the scenes for a particular character with your scene map and timeline. You can work on each scene by character until you have the necessary continuity.
Breaking my book into tiny sections pays off at this stage. I try to break up my Scrivener document into the smallest pieces possible. It's easy to isolate anything I need to modify, instead of having to dig through a five-thousand-word paragraph. Those descriptive section titles make it very easy for me to track the sections I need to work on within my book.
I may change all of the chapter names once the book is complete, but the section titles are initially there as guideposts for the writer, not the reader.
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Action Steps
Look for changes you made in Editing Phases One and Two. Clear up problems with continuity.
Edit by character, rather than timeline. Follow each scene that a character is in and ensure their behavior and motivation stays consistent.
Use Find and Replace to make any changes that appear in multiple chapters.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 31