How to Use Your First Chapter to Edit Your Whole Book

All of your writing issues are right there.

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

Here’s a little secret about editing fiction that you may or may not already know. It’s incredibly repetitive.

Every single writer has a collection of errors that we make over and over again. Mine might be different from yours, but I promise you that after working with 1000s of writers over the years, I’ve never come across a single one that didn’t have their own collection.

Here are some of mine:

• My pinkie finger puts a possessive apostrophe in the word ‘its’ via muscle memory. I can’t help it!
• My characters smile and nod so much, they’re like bobble heads in my first drafts.
• I tend to use to-be verbs with an -ing verb, instead of a stronger regular present or past tense verb. So: ‘She was running,’ instead of ‘she ran.’
• I put a tag and a beat in the same paragraph of dialogue too often.
• I use little words like ‘so’, ‘but’, ‘like,’ and ‘only’ at the beginning of sentences too often.

You get the point. I have writing quirks that I know will have to be edited for in my manuscripts. So, my first editing job is to look for those and fix them.