Every scene in your book should count, whether its purpose is to further the plot or build empathy for your characters. This is why I liked the article 10 Checkpoints for Your Scene. It’s a neat little checklist that will help you determine if your scenes have all the necessary elements to be, not only important to the story, but complete as well.
So I’m on a self-editing kick and my article choices will reflect that. Today I’m sharing Ten Tips for Self-Editing. They’re simple things that you can do to help you successfully get through your manuscript review.
How to Make Self-Editing Easy is short article about how you can use Microsoft Word to help you edit your manuscript.
Editing is never painless, even for those who are good at it. It’s easy to miss the small things like repeated words or slow pacing, and beta readers aren’t perfect. Autocrit.com has been a blessing. This program examines 11 different areas of your writing (pacing, clichés, repeated words, dialogue, pronouns, sentence variation, etc.). Better yet, it’ll examine your entire novel at once to give you an over all picture. Go to the website and give it a test drive, you’ll be amazed by what this program catches.
Like all industries, the writing business is monopolized. The web is changing that. It used to be the big publishing houses, but now we have indie presses. Once there was just writing conferences, and now there are dozens of writers forums. Back in the day, getting the latest news in the publishing world was having an inside source, today we have blogs. But the catch is, for all these new resources to be helpful, you have to know where to find them.
So, in an effort to help enlighten the masses (or at least the small number of you who read my blog), I’m going to post try and post a different source for writers everyday. We’ll start with a critique site that I stumbled across last year, Reviewfuse.
Reviewfuse is a community for any type of writer: novelist, essayist, short story authors, poets, etc. EXCEPT for erotic romance/erotica (I was sad to hear that, too). Here’s how it works…
1. You become a member. IT’S FREE! But you can pay for a premium subscription.
2. You upload a piece of your work. You can either set it to private or public. If you choose private, only assigned reviewers will be able to see it, allowing you to retain first publishing rights. However if you make it public, anyone on the site can review it.
3. For guaranteed reviews, you submit your work. Once you do this, you’ll be assigned to do critiques of others work but at your own pace. If you’re a premium member you do 2 critiques and receive 3, and if you are just a basic user you do 4 critiques and receive 3. The great thing about the Reviewfuse is the structured critique format. It allows for in-line comments, and it has rating system for all areas of writing: plot, dialogue, etc. The site is set up in a way that allows you to get the most out of your reviews.
TADA–that’s it. You usually receive your critiques within 72 hours of finishing your assigned reviews.
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