Congratulations ! Your epic space - opera novel is finished , and you ’re preparing to fire off your interrogation letters to agent . But even though you ’ve take your manuscript a hundred time , you still may have missed some weaknesses . Here ’s how to rule them .
I ’ve been struggling with this very issue for the past few days , as I groom to impose unleash my epic fantasy novel on the publishing world . At this point , I ’ve pored over every conviction several times , and I ’ve get two rounds of detailed feedback . And yet , when I started doing a give-and-take - hunting to try and distinguish some potential trouble blot , I was dismayed to find how many shrimpy conviction still lurk in my text , leaching the vital force out of the writing .
And in example it needs saying yet again — this is advice , ground on what seems to improve my own writing . I know of no brassbound prescript for good composition , other than “ order the story the most excellent direction you may . ”
That said , here are some word searches that seemed to uncover the great sine :
1 ) Adverbs .
In a nutshell , you do a search for “ ly ” in your ms . This wo n’t find every adverb — several of them do n’t end in “ ly ” — and you ’ll get some fake positive , like “ fly ” or “ sly . ” But it ’s close enough for regime work . And if you ’re dumbfound overwhelm , you could always add a blank space after “ ly ” — that room , you only get “ ly ” at the end of a parole . ( You ’ll have to do separate search for “ ly ” survey by a comma or period in that showcase . )
Ialready did a whole post about adverbsbefore — but in a nutshell , not all adverbs are defective , and you do n’t have to extirpate them all from your work . But you may notice that adverbs serve as signposts that lead you to some terrible piece of writing . One good example I found my in my own novel was the word “ evidently , ” which usually signaled that that someone was stating the obvious . As in :
https://gizmodo.com/seriously-whats-so-bad-about-adverbs-5437610
When we drop out of hyperspeed at the rendezvous coordinates , we found nothing but rubble and trace actinotherapy where the planet Karma V was hypothesise to be . patently , the Bad Uncles had gotten there first .
You know what ? It ’s obvious enough that you do n’t even need to explain it . Cut abbreviate swing . The same expire for “ intelligibly . ” ( That ’s not an selection from my novel , by the way . ) I also found that I had an insalubrious dependency to “ impossibly ” — which is all right to expend once or twice , but can get really old . ( “ Impossibly big ” is a contradiction in terms — which is okay as a stylistic peak once or twice , but after a while you just vocalize like you ’re full of shit . )
I found a surprising number of adverbs in my supposedly finished novel . I scent up prevent about half of them .
2 ) Sentences beginning with “ It . ”
Just like adverb , this can be fine sometimes . “ It ” is kind of a flat Holy Scripture , with no personality of its own , but it has plenty of uses . The principal trouble with “ it ” is that it ’s a pronoun , so you must be perfectly unclouded about what “ it ” come to to . And when a condemnation begin with “ it , ” that can be another red flag pointing to bad committal to writing . Here are a few examples of trouble sentences , which I ’m build up on the fly , start with “ it ” :
It was worse than I ’d feared . ( What ’s it ? The position ? The predicament ? Instead of tell us it ’s worse , why not dramatize ? )
It devil me that I had to watch my best friend snuff it . ( Why not , “ I could n’t bear to watch my best friend die ? ” )
It made sense that the Dark Legion would want to deploy their planet - crusher weapon to Earth next . ( Again , what ’s it ? Why not just start the condemnation with the planet - crush , or the intellect why this is a good strategy ? Or put an genuine person into your sentence — “ I could see why the Dark Legion would want to deploy their major planet crusher . ” )
It caught me by surprisal : A laser snake , fangs dripping with pernicious photons . ( “ The laser ophidian catch me by surprisal ” is way better , because then your reader is surprised too , rather of being told there ’s a surprise , followed by finding out what the surprise is . )
There ’s load more where that came from . In oecumenical , when you have an “ it , ” there should be a clear antecedent , and that ’s less likely if “ it ” is the scratch line of your time . At least some of the prison term , any sentence that begins with “ it ” will turn out to be something you’re able to safely prune from your Holy Writ : an instance of spoon - feeding the lector selective information that he or she can already harvest elsewhere , or a bit of throat clearing . ( “ It made gumption that rant ” is almost always live on to be spoonful - feeding , for good example . If it really lay down sense , you do n’t have to assert that it makes good sense . If it does n’t , then well … Saying it wo n’t make it so . )
At least half the time , you may decide that “ It ” is a perfectly fine style to begin a time . But you may be surprise by how many times “ it ” ca n’t free its existence once you zero in on it . ( You may also require to do a Book search for the phrase “ it was , ” which could be lie in wait in the center of your judgment of conviction somewhere , and could also be a polarity of rot . )
3 ) There was , or there were .
Most the great unwashed will tell you to keep your use of the verb “ to be ” to an absolute minimum . But you ca n’t quash using “ is ” or “ was ” altogether , and like everything else , “ to be ” has its billet in your prose . Other verb will always be more dynamical and exciting , although they also risk being more purple . ( For case , “ The Dark Fortress was on top of a bombastic - ish mountain ” is bland , and “ The Dark Fortress tower over a large - ish mountain ” is more electrifying . But “ The Dark Fortress vibrated with dour ominousness , over a large - ish hatful ” is perhaps too much . )
The item is , you dead should not do a word of honor search for “ is ” , “ was ” and “ were ” in your novel — you will go nuts and commence clawing your face off before you get a tenth of the way through . Unless you ’re the Zen master of verbs , armed with total verb mindfulness , you will have used the verb “ to be ” a mediocre amount , and you just ca n’t slog through every instance to see if it ’s carrying its own system of weights .
But you absolutely should do a spry search for “ there was ” and “ there were ” — which are pretty clearcut instances of the verb “ to be ” flopping around when a stronger verb could be flexing its muscles . Here ’s an instance :
There were a couple of Evil Nephews guard the Outer Inner Sanctum , and they await like the horn - toothed kind .
you could switch that to “ Two Evil Nephews parade in front of the stone doorway to the Outer Inner Sanctum ” — notice how as soon as the verb is active , you begin seeing the prospect a bit more . Once they ’re march , you want to know what they ’re parading in front of , and that means you see the rock door . Instead of “ parade , ” you could also go for “ stand up at attention ” or “ stood watch ” or “ brandished their Uru lance ” or whatever . They do n’t have to be dancing a jig — but cause them the field of the sentence instead of “ there ” turn them into life , breathe Evil Nephews . They ’re mechanically more formidable and threatening as a final result .
You might not need to eliminate every single instance of “ there was ” or “ there were ” in your novel — but most of them should probably be smack with an Uru spear . And if you find out a heap of them , it ’s a teeny-weeny admonition signboard that your exercise of “ to be ” might remain a piece too generous .
I found a surprising number of examples of “ there was ” and “ there were ” still skulking around my novel , and I pretty much uproot them all . They seemed to browse up most of all in the descriptive or scene - congeal passage , which is where indolent committal to writing often hides . A few sentences in a row of description make a cozy nest for a bland verb construction to crawl into and obliterate .
4 ) Was being , or were being .
Just as most experts will tell you to debar the verb “ to be ” as much as possible , they ’ll also warn you away from passive verb . It ’s the dispute between
Captain Samson was being thrown off the catwalk by a Bad Uncle
and
A Bad Uncle lifted Captain Samson over his nous and hurled her over the bound of the catwalk .
You want the subject of the sentence to be the person who ’s actually doing something — not the someone who ’s having it done to them . sure enough , we feel speculative for Captain Samson in this illustration , but that does n’t make her the subject field .
If you ’re like me , you ’ve probably been indoctrinate jolly heavily with the hate of passive sentences . This loathing has been drummed into us — so you ’ve probably already made an effort to slash and cut any prison term whose principal role player was n’t the subject . But what if some of these passive verb have been overlooked ? How can you find them ?
There ’s no way to do a parole search to eradicate passive verb constructions altogether ( unless you really want to look at every instance of the verb “ to be ” in your book , in which casing see above . ) But you could do a lot of fuss - shooting by front for “ was being ” and “ were being . ” These are n’t just peaceful verb constructions — they ’re also the verb “ to be ” doubly in a run-in .
Not only is something being done to your character , but it ’s also in the process of being done . So we do n’t even get to see the military action happening , we sort of see it as a frozen tableau of passivity . It ’s getting done , and at some point , it ’ll be completed , but there ’s no rush or anything . You could , you know , go get a sandwich and descend back , and Captain Samson would still be in the middle of being sky off the catwalk .
Update : Anindita on Twitterhas a great suggestion for another set of phrases you could search for . try on doing a word search for “ he watch ” or “ she ensure ” and “ he experience ” or “ she felt . ” These are instances where you ’re dampening the shock of what ’s get going on by filtering it through someone else ’s perceptions , which is mechanically less compelling .
And that ’s all I ’ve make , in terms of last - minute bug - search . The purpose here is n’t just to be nit - picky and OCD , though — it ’s to get you to look at your novel in a different way , one last fourth dimension . That ’s why I mentioned that these searches are for multitude who ’ve already say the nearly - final tipple a billion time . Once you single out one particular sentence building and jump looking for it throughout your novel , you ’ll break up your common reading blueprint and you may find yourself noticing other little problem that had n’t jumped out at you before .
Maybe read a bunch of prison term in a row with “ was being ” in them will make you think about how you depict action . Or maybe you ’ll cream off through all your different descriptive passages and point out some tick that you are prone to , which you had n’t noticed before because they ’re always spaced a few Sir Frederick Handley Page asunder and buried in descriptive prose . Anything that give you a new cognizance of what you ’re doing , at the sentence level , can only lighten your novel , even if you end up not exchange some stuff .
And in the end , zippier writing is Captain Samson ’s best ally in the fight against the Bad Uncles . If the readers ’ eyes are n’t glazing over , the story will cannonball along by faster , and Captain Samson ’s inevitable victory will be that much juicy .
Ron Turner cover artistry images viaGems From The Collection on Flickr .
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