Self-editing for authors

[StillStunned]

Tip on a glaringly obvious error... I just submitted, a few days ago, my second effort to Lit stories. I was so assured (self-assured) of it's splendidness I FAILED to make a GRAMMAR & SPELL CHECK...!!! I should be shot, or at least deprived of shots for at least a month...! UNFORGIVEABLE

For the past two years, I've been going on about Read Aloud as the final proofreading check. Then a few months ago I didn't use it for three stories, and they have some absolutely glaring mistakes in them.

We learn from this story that we're never so good that we can forego the basics.

 

[TheLobster]

We learn from this story that we're never so good that we can forego the basics.

I recently discovered the kind of mistake that Read Aloud does not catch, at least not for me. I've been perusing the previous chapters of my current series, all of which I've sent through the voice wringer before submitting, and I found a glaring one in like the second paragraph.

It was a wrong pronoun, "her" instead of "his", in a compound but not particularly complex sentence. Apparently, even my ESL brain can do the substitution the fly, while listening to TTS at 1.5x speed, and mentally correct the mistake before I can consciously register it.

And if that's the case for me, then I weep for you natives. Double-check your pronouns!

 

[DeMont]

I recently discovered the kind of mistake that Read Aloud does not catch, at least not for me. I've been perusing the previous chapters of my current series, all of which I've sent through the voice wringer before submitting, and I found a glaring one in like the second paragraph.

It was a wrong pronoun, "her" instead of "his", in a compound but not particularly complex sentence. Apparently, even my ESL brain can do the substitution the fly, while listening to TTS at 1.5x speed, and mentally correct the mistake before I can consciously register it.

And if that's the case for me, then I weep for you natives. Double-check your pronouns!

This is Native 155 to Command, copy that last, over...!

 

[Belegon]

One thing I discovered over the years is a propensity to overuse certain words. It's not an obvious thing, but it does clean up my writing tremendously (opinion) when I take the extra step of searching for those words and replacing most of them. The worst one I still struggle with is "That". I over use it by a significant margin.

Simply run a search for the word YOU overuse. Change the majority of your uses of it. It does make a difference.

 

[Nynah]

One thing I discovered over the years is a propensity to overuse certain words. It's not an obvious thing, but it does clean up my writing tremendously (opinion) when I take the extra step of searching for those words and replacing most of them. The worst one I still struggle with is "That". I over use it by a significant margin.

Simply run a search for the word YOU overuse. Change the majority of your uses of it. It does make a difference.

There have been a couple of threads already on overused words but Penny actually started one around word clouds and I found it extremely helpful. Having a list of the most commonly used words in your story is incredibly useful but having a neat little word cloud with the most used words in large size text is humorous as well. Mine were "just" and "back" so now when I'm editing I always look for those first.

 

[nicksouth]

Second simple edit tip: "Seemed to"

Man how i hate this. While it can be necessary depending on who's narrating the story, most times I see it used improperly or in a place where it can be eliminated.

Appropriate use:
"My sister seemed to be upset." - 1st person perspective. Hes not 100 sure she is upset, and he can't read her mind.

Inappropriate use:
"Bob entered the hotel room, carrying his luggage. He seemed to struggle with the weight of it."

3rd person narration. Decide. Did he struggle with it? Yes? Then "seemed to" is irrelevant.

Again the rules get fuzzy in some spots. But my suggestion is, any time you can cut it and the sentence still works, cut it.

"Seemed" is on my hit list. I found a posting on here sometime back that had a list of words to consider killing and I've found it super helpful. Periodically, I add to it and every story goes through it. Going to add the "and then" example right now.

 

[nicksouth]

One thing I discovered over the years is a propensity to overuse certain words. It's not an obvious thing, but it does clean up my writing tremendously (opinion) when I take the extra step of searching for those words and replacing most of them. The worst one I still struggle with is "That". I over use it by a significant margin.

Simply run a search for the word YOU overuse. Change the majority of your uses of it. It does make a difference.

I have a long list of commonly overused words and added my own. I removed "that" because while I horribly overuse it, the grammar checker does a better job of fixing it than I do.

 

[nicksouth]

I've settled on a long(ish) process but it works reasonably. I still likely make way too many mistakes but at some point, I call it done.

1/ Write draft in Google Drive with live word count on. Never go backward, no editing, poor spelling. Anything goes. The only exception I make is if I realize I've used the wrong character name. Then I'll fix it or note it. These are insidious.
2/ In Step 1, if I need to fix something above, I use [XXX note] and move on. This is easy to search later.
3/ Paste into ProWritingAid and go through fixing grammar, spelling, word choice, etc. I don't use the AI rewrite in my text but sometimes I will use it to jog a suggestion loose.
4/ Set down for 2-3 days
5/ Read over and decide if I need to kill parts, change the story, anything bigger than grammar/spelling.
6/ Paste into Google Drive and use my "exclude" list of all the words I overuse. I update this list periodically. It trims a lot of useless crap.
7/ Paste into QuillBot—it finds completely different grammar errors than the other tools
8/ Back into GDrive and a final read-through and tweak
9/ Copy final version back to ProWritingAid.
10/ Submit
11/ Usually realize a horrid mistake slipped through and have a glass(es) of wine

 

[DeMont]

I've settled on a long(ish) process but it works reasonably. I still likely make way too many mistakes but at some point, I call it done.

1/ Write draft in Google Drive with live word count on. Never go backward, no editing, poor spelling. Anything goes. The only exception I make is if I realize I've used the wrong character name. Then I'll fix it or note it. These are insidious.
2/ In Step 1, if I need to fix something above, I use [XXX note] and move on. This is easy to search later.
3/ Paste into ProWritingAid and go through fixing grammar, spelling, word choice, etc. I don't use the AI rewrite in my text but sometimes I will use it to jog a suggestion loose.
4/ Set down for 2-3 days
5/ Read over and decide if I need to kill parts, change the story, anything bigger than grammar/spelling.
6/ Paste into Google Drive and use my "exclude" list of all the words I overuse. I update this list periodically. It trims a lot of useless crap.
7/ Paste into QuillBot—it finds completely different grammar errors than the other tools
8/ Back into GDrive and a final read-through and tweak
9/ Copy final version back to ProWritingAid.
10/ Submit
11/ Usually realize a horrid mistake slipped through and have a glass(es) of wine

Whoa...! That's an impressive editing regimen.
I'm going to take a look at ProWritingAid, QuillBot etc. and see if they'll help me. Good ideas @nicksouth... only one thing, step 11, I'll take a double shot of good Irish double malt.

I have found that the hardest thing about self-editing is to do it without computerised aids, except for the "Spell & Grammar" function in Microsoft Word (and that's only right abought 75% of the time anyway) Doing your own proof reading without aids is, I think, prone to problems because you tend to "turn a blind eye" to the little details and they're the ones that'll get you in the end.

Thanks Nick.

Deepest Respects,
D.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have found that the hardest thing about self-editing is to do it without computerised aids, except for the "Spell & Grammar" function in Microsoft Word (and that's only right abought 75% of the time anyway) Doing your own proof reading without aids is, I think, prone to problems because you tend to "turn a blind eye" to the little details and they're the ones that'll get you in the end.

My way to get around that is to change font, font size, and colour regularly during drafting and again during final read throughs. It's enough in my case to catch nearly all gremlins, because the eye sees it differently each time. Inevitably, a couple of goofs make it through to published product, but never enough to bother about. I think in my last story, 14k words, I found three errors, which is so far down in the noise not to worry about.

I use Worditout word clouds too, which identify the most used one hundred words, excluding a the and buts, those itty bitty words you can't not use.

 

[TheRedLantern]

My way to get around that is to change font, font size, and colour regularly during drafting and again during final read throughs. It's enough in my case to catch nearly all gremlins, because the eye sees it differently each time

This is such a great idea! I had been inadvertently doing this over the last two weeks as I realized I needed new glasses and I'd been catching a lot of those little things that an automated tool would miss (eg, "the" when I meant "then"). It hadn't even occurred to me that changing the font size was helping me see the manuscript differently!

 

[ElectricBlue]

This is such a great idea! I had been inadvertently doing this over the last two weeks as I realized I needed new glasses and I'd been catching a lot of those little things that an automated tool would miss (eg, "the" when I meant "then"). It hadn't even occurred to me that changing the font size was helping me see the manuscript differently!

Change it dramatically, too. If your normal setting is a (fairly typical) 10 or 12 point font, change it to 16 or 18, much bigger. I rotate between dark colours too, and I suspect serif and non serif will make a difference, although I tend towards non-serif. For me, they're easier to read on a screen.

Probably, if I printed the whole thing, I'd find even more, even quicker, but that's going a bit too far. Too much paper, and how do I explain that to the wife?

 

[nicksouth]

Whoa...! That's an impressive editing regimen.
I'm going to take a look at ProWritingAid, QuillBot etc. and see if they'll help me. Good ideas @nicksouth... only one thing, step 11, I'll take a double shot of good Irish double malt.

I have found that the hardest thing about self-editing is to do it without computerised aids, except for the "Spell & Grammar" function in Microsoft Word (and that's only right abought 75% of the time anyway) Doing your own proof reading without aids is, I think, prone to problems because you tend to "turn a blind eye" to the little details and they're the ones that'll get you in the end.

Thanks Nick.

Deepest Respects,
D.

I am horrible at grammar, despite getting a "good English" education, haha. I don't feel like it's a worthwhile investment for me at this point.

ProWritingAid is nice, and so is QuillBot, but both tools have limitations. Most of the suggestions or rewrites they suggest are wooden and stilted and not geared toward erotica. I use about 1% of their features and never lit it write stuff for me.

ProWritingAid seems to move faster and have more tools, but Quillbot picks up a lot of things it misses, so I use both for now

Happy to share my "reject" list, especially since the origins of it were from a post on Literotica.

I'm sure my work is still full of errors. I tend to be long-winded, and my characters wander off-topic, even during sex scenes. Such are my limitations, I suppose.

The reject list is indispensable. So many weak words can be killed easily, but it takes a couple of hours to go over something like a 12K story properly.

Distance is valuable too. Taking a few days between edits (if you can afford them) helps significantly.

 

[nicksouth]

My way to get around that is to change font, font size, and colour regularly during drafting and again during final read throughs. It's enough in my case to catch nearly all gremlins, because the eye sees it differently each time. Inevitably, a couple of goofs make it through to published product, but never enough to bother about. I think in my last story, 14k words, I found three errors, which is so far down in the noise not to worry about.

I use Worditout word clouds too, which identify the most used one hundred words, excluding a the and buts, those itty bitty words you can't not use.

I'm going to try a word cloud for sure! ProWritingAid can do some similar things. I think. It can also look for repeated words close to each other and repeated phrases, I think. Not sure if it can do a word cloud.

With my "reject" list, I do a search for each word in Google Docs and it will tell me how many times I've used it. Then I flip between each use, gradually culling it, until I've either eliminated or vastly reduced the use of that word. Not perfect but it helps.

 

[StillStunned]

A trick that's so obvious to me that I don't even think about it anymore, but it's one of the final stages of proofreading: do a Find & Replace for double spaces. I gather that Lit automatically removes double spaces, but if you're publishing elsewhere this might be something to bear in mind. Double spaces look sloppy.

 

[Davidbeer1]

Editing and proofreading are different processes, but some people often treat them as one and the same. I'm sure that we all do both at once, but errors are often introduced while editing, so everything that has been altered should be proofread afterwards. Then, and only then, the whole thing should be run through the Word spelling and grammar checkers, but its suggestions should not be accepted automatically.

 

[CleverGenericName]

Building on the last comment, I also think of editing and proofreading as separate processes, and take different approaches / use different tools for each.

Proofreading

My dyslexia and ADHD make proofreading challenging, so I have tried to automate the process as much as possible. I am currently using the paid version of Grammarly to review my spelling and grammar. I will occasionally use it to improve sentence structure or simplify a sentence, but I review each recommendation in that regard very carefully.

When I have a near-final version, I use the MS Word Read Aloud function (as many other commentators have already covered) and typically find at least a few dozen issues that Grammarly has missed (often because a specific sentence or usage is ambiguous).

My wife will often do a final proofread / beta read for me, and always catches additional issues/errors.

Editing

I try to leverage different LLMs to enhance my editing process (currently, I use both paid ChatGPT and free Gemini). Over the past year, I have built up a small library of editing prompts, which I run sequentially to check for:
1. Factual accuracy
2. Continuity
3. Consistency in my usage of names and places
4. Consistency and accuracy in my use of contractions in dialogue

I will also use a broader/more generic prompt, such as: "As a veteran literary editor and proofreader, please review the attached fictional story and provide your analysis on how it could be enhanced/improved." It is not always helpful, but it often makes suggestions that are helpful or, at the very least, forces me to think critically about why I took a particular approach in a section.

If I'm stuck on a particular phrase and can't seem to get it just right, I sometimes use ChatPGT to generate a list of 50 alternative versions, which helps get my creative juices flowing.

Final Edit

If I have the patience, I try to let the penultimate version of a story sit for at least a week before I give it a final read-through.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Editing

I try to leverage different LLMs to enhance my editing process (currently, I use both paid ChatGPT and free Gemini). Over the past year, I have built up a small library of editing prompts, which I run sequentially to check for:
1. Factual accuracy
2. Continuity
3. Consistency in my usage of names and places
4. Consistency and accuracy in my use of contractions in dialogue

Be warned, you might come unstuck with such use of AI if you submit stories here. There's possibly a very fine line between "editing tools" and "suspected use of AI" - the site doesn't allow use of AI.

 

[Carmina24]

Self-editing is like flirting with your own reflection—
You fall in love with a line,
then slash it in the next breath.
It’s a battle between ego and clarity,
a slow dance of cutting what you adore
so the reader can adore what remains.
Painful? Yes.
Necessary? Always.

 

[iwatchus]

I use both paid ChatGPT and free Gemini). Over the past year, I have built up a small library of editing prompts, which I run sequentially to check for:
1. Factual accuracy

I find it comical to use ChatGPT for checking factual accuracy

 

[TheLobster]

I find it comical to use ChatGPT for checking factual accuracy

It's fine. You just have to correct it when it gets things wrong.

 

[ColinPiper]

Picking up his glass, he made a beeline for the blonde at the other end of the bar.

Buttoning up my coat, I stepped out into the freezing morning.

Noticing my laces had come undone, I stooped to tie them and saw the hundred dollar bill.

The above construct - starting sentences with an -ing word. If you want to sound professional, don't do it. I've read stories where nearly every action is described this way. Maddening. Your story will sound better without them.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

Picking up his glass, he made a beeline for the blonde at the other end of the bar.

Buttoning up my coat, I stepped out into the freezing morning.

Noticing my laces had come undone, I stooped to tie them and saw the hundred dollar bill.

The above construct - starting sentences with an -ing word. If you want to sound professional, don't do it. I've read stories where nearly every action is described this way. Maddening. Your story will sound better without them.

I agree, though I’m sure I do this too sometimes. I think it’s an author’s attempt to have things flow on the page. Ironically, it can temporarily paralyze a reader trying to follow both clauses.

 

[ColinPiper]

I agree, though I’m sure I do this too sometimes. I think it’s an author’s attempt to have things flow on the page. Ironically, it can temporarily paralyze a reader trying to follow both clauses.

Yes, I've done it too for particular sentences that naturally flow that way. But sparingly.

 

[TheLobster]

I want to “sound professional” when I'm writing an email at work, not an erotic story in my spare time. So, thanks but no thanks.