The reader
Who is the reader? Who do you want to read the book? Is it intended for adults or children? Will it appeal more to women than to men? Is there too much description and not enough action for your intended reader? Or too little?

Location
How have you used location? Readers today generally don’t want a lot of description, but every scene takes place somewhere. The location may make a difference to how the scene proceeds. A rocking boat may make movement uncertain. A noisy cafe may impede conversation.

Dialogue
Is all the punctuation correct, with quote marks, commas, full stops in the right places? Is there a new paragraph for each new speaker? Is it clear who is speaking? Endless repeats of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ get tiresome, and you can miss them out for two or three paragraphs if you only have two speakers.

However, don’t make the mistake of using lots of synonyms for ‘said’ to create variety. Variety is essential in descriptive words but they make the reader stop and stumble if you use them for speech tags. Provided there aren’t too many speech tags, the mind skims over ‘he said’ easily.

As an alternative to the ‘he said, she said’ speech tags, you can use beats, small bits of action to label who is speaking. For example, ‘Tom scratched his head. “What should we do about it?”’
Inserting bits of action into long chunks of dialogue is essential. People rarely just sit and talk without interacting with their environment in some way. One of my bad habits is writing pages of dialogue without action that punctuates it.

Wordcraft
This is where micro-editing becomes really micro. You need to go through your text word-by-word. This is what I’m doing at the moment with The Golden Illusion. Obviously you want to check for spelling mistakes. But there’s a host of other things you need to check for too.

• Favourite words: We all have favourite words or constructions we tend to overuse. Seek them out and destroy them. For example, I tend to writing ‘I’m not going to do that’ when it would be much simpler to say ‘I won’t do that.’
• Overused words: Some words are routinely overused. All of us tend to overuse words such as can/could, seem, think/believe, feel/feeling/felt, was/were, know/knew, hear/heard, look, see/saw, watch/notice/observe, it, that, just and maybe. Slash them down. You can’t eliminate every one, but make sure you don’t overuse them.
• Words that aren’t working for their keep: Also on the hit list, words that aren’t doing any work. For example, ‘It seemed to him that she was interested.’ The phrase ‘It seemed to him that’ is just padding. Eliminate words that aren’t pulling their weight.
• Adjectives and adverbs: Look out for overuse of adjectives and adverbs. It’s often a sign of weak writing. Why say ‘She looked at him angrily’ when you can use a stronger verb and say ‘She glared at him’?
• Sentence length: Don’t make it hard for your reader. Hunt down sentences that are too long, and break them up. As a rule of thumb, keep sentences below 30 words. Same thing with paragraphs – break them if they’re running to more than 5 sentences.
• Pronouns: Overuse of pronouns at the beginning of sentence is another common fault. I’m often guilty of in first draft of having up to 40% of my sentences start with pronouns – “I opened the door and stared at her”. “She looked at me”. It makes for boring writing. Varying the sentence structure makes the writing flow – “Once inside the door, I stared at her.” As a general rule, keep those initial pronouns to 30% or less of sentences.
• There are many other technical elements, such as avoiding the passive voice – it’s weaker to say ‘Tom was invited by Sue’ than to use the active voice ‘Sue invited Tom.’

Going through all these checks is time-consuming, but it’s worth it to improve the readability and power of your writing. I automate detection of problems by using editing software. This saves some time, but it still takes me the best part of a day to copy edit a chapter.

Soul
What is the book’s soul? What was the kernel of truth you wanted to communicate when you first had the idea? When you look at comments you’ve got from readers, do they advance or impede this soul? This may help you decide which comments to work on, and which to ignore.

Character

• Are your main characters the right ones for telling your story? Usually you’ve got this right, but not always.
• Is the motivation clear? What do your main characters want? Without motivation, the story won’t move forward. Is the behaviour of the main characters and the interaction between them consistent?
• Are your main characters interesting? They don’t have to be likeable, but there must be something about them that resonates with the reader and makes him or her want to find out what happens to them.
• Are your main characters’ voices distinct and consistent? Check that you haven’t introduced your own voice by mistake.
• What role do the minor characters play? Do they have a purpose in the story? What would happen to the story if you cut them out? If the answer is ‘nothing’ then consider removing the characters who serve no purpose. Be ruthless. Kill your darlings.

Story
Does the story structure work?

Beginning and ending

• Have you written a page-turner opening that makes the reader want to continue?
• Does the opening set up the problem and does the ending resolve it? If not, do you need to remove or relocate the opening and the ending? One reader pointed out that she though the real beginning of The Golden Illusion comes in Chapter 3, and I have a horrible feeling she may be right.
• What’s the inciting incident? Does it happen because of something the main character does, or is it external?
• Is there a climax? Does it come at the appropriate place, just before the ending? Is there a denouement which ties up the loose ends and resolves the plot? I have a recurring tendency to stop too soon and not write a proper denouement.

Middle

• Is there an arc of rising action, including setbacks?
• Do scenes end on cliffhangers to keep the reader motivated?
• Is there a logical connection between each scene and the next in this middle part? Can you say for every scene ‘this happens because ….’?
• Does each scene move the story forward? If not, you know it, kill your darlings.
• Do you need to raise the stakes? Have you pushed your main character as far as he or she will go? In the early drafts of The Golden Illusion, I hadn’t given my hero nearly enough of a hard time.

People talk about rules of good writing. I’ve used the term myself. But really, there are no rules, just tips. See? I broke a rule there – I started a sentence with a conjunction, ‘but’. Did it bother you? It avoided the comma and the run-on sentence if I’d made it a clause. You can break the rules if it makes sense. Following the rules blindly just leads to weak writing. Follow the tips when they make sense.

The so-called rules are there for a good reason – they distil a lot of experience. The show-don’t-tell rule, for example, is a pretty good tip. Writing is a collaboration between the author and the reader. Constant telling, constant narration, distances the reader. Showing involves the reader in deciding for herself what is going on.

If I write ‘Peter was old and sickly’ I’m telling you how to see Peter.
If I write ‘Peter shuffled towards me, supported by a stick. The effort of every step was etched in pain on his furrowed face’ I’ve invited you to picture Peter and draw your own conclusions.

Does that mean a writer must always show rather than tell? No, of course not. If the detail is unimportant to the story, tell it. If Jane walks down the stairs, it’s much better to say this, rather than tiring the reader with a long description of the stairs and the walking. Use the show-don’t-tell tip when there’s a good reason to do so.

Closely related to show-don’t-tell is the adverb rule. All writing manuals tell you to use adverbs sparingly. Stephen King goes further and would have us eliminate all adverbs. He argues that adverbs make for sloppy writing, signs the author is fearful that she isn’t getting her point across clearly.

I, like many amateurs, am guilty of breaking the adverb rule. Of 1,000 words in the story I described in the last post, 18 were adverbs. After editing, I reduced this to 14, but that’s still 14 that Stephen King would say shouldn’t be there. Maybe he’s right. He’s a successful author and I’m not.

Let’s look at this though. Why this particular hatred for one part of speech? In case you forgot your school grammar lessons, adverbs are words that modify verbs, and usually end in –ly (though not all do – ‘up’, for example is also an adverb). We don’t have the same rules about nouns, or verbs, or adjectives. Is this just textism? What’s the reason?

Reason one. It makes sense to eliminate adverbs when they’re making the writing weaker. Sometimes they just cover up failure to find better words. For example ‘he spoke quietly’ is unnecessary – it would be stronger to say ‘he whispered’ or ‘he murmured’. Many times, we can eliminate adverbs by using a stronger verb. In this sense, adverbs can be good pointers at the editing stage to where we need to polish the writing.

Reason two. When the adverb is doing no work at all, purge it. For example, in the phrase ‘he shouted loudly’ the adverb loudly is doing nothing – a shout is loud. Or, to take another example, ‘he said interestingly’. If what he says is interesting, maybe that he’s discovered the secret of time travel, then the reader doesn’t need the adverb, and if it’s dull, maybe that he’s tired, the adverb doesn’t change the dullness. Though, even there, if the character to whom he’s speaking has good reason to be interested, the adverb may still justify its place.

Reason three. Adverbs may distance the reader by telling, rather than showing. They can narrate details the reader should be filling in for themselves. For example ‘she looked suspiciously at the box’ could be better written ‘she examined the box, checking for booby traps.’

There may be other good reasons for eliminated adverbs. I couldn’t think of them while writing this. The point is that if there’s a reason not to use an adverb, don’t use it. By the same token, if there is a reason to use an adverb, then use it. Adverbs are pretty much like adjectives. Adverbs can add description to verbs, bringing a picture to life, in the same way as adjectives can bring nouns to life.

For example, take this phrase from the story I’ve just edited, ‘trees perched crazily like sure goats on precipitous falls.’ I spent some time considering whether to remove or change the ‘crazily.’ It’s doing some pretty important descriptive work, showing the random arrangement of the vegetation. It can’t be turned into the adjective ‘crazy’ since neither the trees nor the goats are crazy. The only thing that’s crazy is the perching. So, I retained the adverb. I think I had good reason to do so.

Technically, I suppose you could argue that the ‘crazy’ and the ‘sure’ contradict each other and one of them should go. I would disagree – crazy paving isn’t less secure as paving for being crazy. You might also argue that the description is overdone, with two adjectives and one adverb in the phrase. Overusing descriptive words in the belief this makes the writing more literary is a classic error of amateurs. You might be right, but there are some good reasons in the context to be highly descriptive.

So, here’s my conclusion. We give adverbs too hard a time. It’s a good tip to think long and hard about why an adverb is there, and what work it’s doing. But, should we eliminate every adverb? No. As with every other part of our writing, we should make it as crisp and effective as we can. I’m all for better verbs, adjectives, gerunds and nouns, as well as better adverbs. The prejudice against adverbs is simply textism.

There is a big however to the defence of adverbs. Agents, editors and publishers often believe in the ‘no adverbs’ tip as an iron-clad rule. If you submit a work full of adverbs, however well-chosen and hard-working, they may just put a red pencil through it and decide you’re an amateur. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

There are many tools for writers out there. Goodness! How on earth did Shakespeare and Dickens managed without them?

Plot, structure and character

I’ve already talked about te tools for plot and character that I use for keeping track of the storyline, scenes, and characters. You can buy software that does this, but I make my own in spreadsheets. Obviously, you also need something to write on. Like most people, I use a word processor, but you can also get dedicated author software.

Depending on how you write, such software may help you. I tend to write in a fairly linear way from the beginning to the end. I know that some people write scenes just as they occur to them, starting in the middle of the book. Shuffling and re-ordering scenes can be very frustrating on a word processor. I can’t review any of the dedicated tools that make this easy, because I don’t use them. The most popular, however, seems to be Scrivener, which combines a word processor and a project management tool.

Here, I want to talk about tools that can help with the third essential element – the writing itself. Good writing is about sentences that are easy to read, dialogue that sings, evocative description, and scenes that make the reader want to keep turning the page. The most important thing here is, of course, practice. Write lots, get friends and colleagues to criticize it, and you’ll improve. Reading your work aloud to yourself can also help you spot the bits that don’t work. But there are some tools that can help.

Spelling grammar and words

A good word processor will have inbuilt spell-check and grammar-check, as well as a minimal thesaurus. A thesaurus is invaluable for authors. You read your sentence, like “John stared in fright at the apparition.” You can see the sentence should pack more punch. The problem is “in fright”. The word should be working harder. You consult your Thesaurus and find alternatives – panic, terror, dread, for example. You can buy a Roget’s Thesaurus or use the online version (http://www.thesaurus.com).

If you write, as I do, historical fiction, you have another word problem. There’s nothing worse than a Tudor character saying something like “you’re messing with my mind”. It transports the reader straight back into the twenty-first century and the spell is broken. So how do you check when a particular word first came into use? Enter the Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com). I used this a lot in writing A Prize of Sovereigns. The archer, Reuven, for example addresses his comrades in arms as “mate”. But when did this first come into use with this meaning? Is it modern? The dictionary reassured me that it goes back to the mid-fourteenth century.

Stringing the words together

Sounds obvious, but this is where most of the trouble comes in. There are so many mistakes you can inadvertently make. We all have favourite words that we tend to over-use. We can inadvertently repeat the same word too close together. We overuse adverbs. We write sentences that are too long, or that make the reader stumble. We use the passive instead of the active. We allow the pace to drop.

There is editing software that can help you detect and correct these and other problems. There’s quite a neat little fee website at http://www.thedreamside.com/machine.html, which gives you word-counts for frequently used words and which flags up “hot-spots” where the same word is used repeatedly close together. You can find more sophisticated editing help from Pro Writing Aid (https://prowritingaid.com). The free version will give you reports on 17 different aspects of your writing. It will check for things like over-used words and repeated phrases, pacing, clichés, writing style, over-long sentences, and sentences that don’t flow well. The image, for example, shows the check for pacing on two of the chapters from The Wheel Turns, the sequel to Prize of Sovereigns, which I’m working on now.

The blue bars show areas of action or dialogue, while the white spaces are areas of background or introspection. Areas of white should be sprinkled through the text, rather than all dumped in one place. I was reasonably happy with the pacing, though there is a warning sign in the first chapter, with a slower area coming very close to the beginning.

I’m fairly impressed with Pro Writing Aid. With 17 reports, the amount of information you get back can seem a little daunting, but, as you work through them, you can decide which suggestions to respond to, and which to ignore. If you’re not employing a real copy editor, software like this can help sharpen up your prose