Last Read Before Outside Feedback: Story Savvy Self-Editing Episode 47

Additional thoughts on removing extra or erroneous blank lines: Double-spaced lines should not be done with the tab/return keys. If you, when drafting or earlier in editing, had introduced a lot of blank lines with a goal of double spaced lines, you still need to take those back out. Then, when you’re ready to format, simply select all and set the formatting rules to double spaced lines within the settings of the document, rather than manually. 

Lastly, the other episode I referenced in the transcript below can be found here:

Episode 37: Handling Jumps in Time, Place, & POV

Happy editing!

Episode 47 Overview:

Last Read Before Outside Feedback

“How can I get the most out of my final self-editing full read-through of my book before getting outside feedback? What would I be watching for, and what are some best practices around it?

This episode of the Story Savvy Series, a podcast for fantasy authors, dives into improving reader clarity and editing repetitive words through a strategic final read-through. Learn how to catch typos in fiction, polish your manuscript, and do everything else needed for beta reader prep. Rebecca shares self editing tips for writers that will help you turn your good story into a great one. 

Join developmental editor Rebecca Hartwell and aspiring middle grade fantasy author Agnes Wolfe as they walk through how to tackle the final read-through of your manuscript. From formatting fixes to chapter polish, they break down what to do—and what to avoid—before handing your story off for outside feedback.

In this Episode: 

• What makes the final read-through different
• Key formatting issues you must fix manually
• Tools and strategies for catching typos and grammar mistakes
• When to stop revising AND when to keep going
• Ways to change how you “see” your draft 

Resources:

• Hart Bound Developmental Editing
• Agnes Wolfe - agneswolfeauthor.com
• Dragonheart Academy - Dragonheartacademy.com

See you next week for episode 48: How To Get Unstuck!

Episode 47 Transcript:

Last Read Before Outside Feedback

Rebecca Hartwell: Hello and welcome to the Hart Bound Editing Podcast. This is episode 47 of the weekly Story Savvy series, where we tackle the 52 biggest self-editing topics and tips to help you make your good story great, as an aspiring author asks me, a developmental editor, all of the questions that you have wanted to. We have covered a bunch in this series so far, including last week's episode on Part 1 of Final Checks, specifically, revisiting gaps and sticking points. Today, we're going to do part two and discuss what to watch for and what to do with our final read-through of a manuscript. By the end of this episode, you will hopefully feel confident reading through your story critically one last time to prepare to get outside feedback. Joining me to ask all of the questions is my friend and co-host, Agnes Wolff. Hello.

Agnes Wolfe: Hi, I'm an aspiring fantasy author who hopes to release her first middle-grade fantasy later this year, and also the host and founder of Author's Alcove. I'm here today to do part two of the final checks and discuss what to watch for and do with your final read-through. Okay, so I have already, and I'm sure everybody else at this point has read through their manuscripts who knows how many times, is it really important to go through it this one last time?

Rebecca: I think so, and specifically, I think that it's important to do so giving yourself permission, or taking my permission, to pay attention to everything. And just read through, paying attention to the story, and catch whatever you can catch. In earlier steps in this series, I recommend watching for one layer of the story at a time, because you want to tackle one specific topic completely. This is your chance to go through and go, “Oh, I forgot to, you know, fix this genre moment,” and “oh, I wanted to tweak this line about her character arc.” It's your chance to go through and just expand your mindset around the story and try to catch all of the last-minute things. And then going off of that a little bit, there are a number of very specific considerations that you want to bear in mind when you're doing this final read.

Agnes: Like what?

Rebecca: So, essentially, like I mentioned already, anything that you missed on a previous editing round, but also, very specifically, you want to look for any formatting issues to fix which you can't do a search and replace or a select all to do. And, also very importantly, you want to make sure that it is always clear who says or does each moment in the story. And then lastly on the list of goals for this read-through, this is where you want to really pay attention and try to catch the typos, missing words, added words, incorrectly autocorrected words, which I see in my own work a fair bit, issues with grammar, or punctuation, and all of the other copy-editing level issues to fix.

Agnes: Is that it? [both laughing]

Rebecca: Yes, that's it.

Agnes: Are we really going to watch, or trying to watch out for all of those and fix all of those in one read-through?

Rebecca: It's kind of up to you. You don't want to put too much emphasis on the polishing until after you've done these sort of structural feedback steps that we're going to be talking about in previous episodes, and I know that sounds contradictory to what I've said in previous episodes, but, this is a structural self-editing series, so we are going to be putting a lot more emphasis on structure than polishing. However, some degree of polishing does need to be done. So, if you're like me, and you tend to naturally drift in the direction of putting more emphasis on structural and less on polishing, then yeah, one final read-through is probably fine for your goals and your personality and where the story's at. If you're the kind of person who enjoys doing many, many read-throughs and really tweaking the language and the wording and the prose and all of that, it might well be more than that. It is pretty much entirely up to you.

Agnes: So, I just want to ask about something that you previously mentioned, and it's with the copy-editing level stuff, like typos and missing words. Are we just watching out for what we can personally catch? Even if we're going to be sending it off to a copy editor later.

Rebecca: So, I'm definitely the kind of person who struggles to catch these things on my own, so if any of our listeners are also that kind of person, I totally get it. You do want to catch what you can on your own, but know that's not the only thing that you should be doing here. This is the stage where I do suggest copy and pasting each chapter one at a time into some sort of grammar spelling checker. And I've mentioned it before, I personally recommend ProWritingAid. But if you don't want to pay for that, if you don't like that particular platform, what I recommend for catching spell and grammar, punctuation, those kind of things, is to paste that chapter into at least 3 different word processors with some sort of built-in checker. So that might be Microsoft Word and Google Docs, and maybe Gmail, or any sort of free online Hemingway, AutoCrit, anything like that. Why I suggest doing it in 3 different programs is each of them is going to have slightly different feedback. I just know, for example, Google Docs and Microsoft Word have very different ideas about comma usage. So, when you're getting more than one program to check it, you're more likely to get different aspects checked, and have different opinions on where you could or could not put commas to be correct. And I've also noticed that when my whole book is in one document, it's more likely that things are going to get missed. So, if I copy and paste out, words that previously looked fine are suddenly going to have that red underline, and I need to fix it. So, going through chapter by chapter as you're doing the read to get outside feedback, specifically assistive AI feedback, on the spelling and grammar is very, very helpful at this stage.

Agnes: So, I have to laugh about the comma thing, because I am terrible at commas. Like, I know the rules, so when I actually go to proofread it, I can do that. But I did find that—because I do copy and paste mine to several different documents, because I want it saved in several different documents—I do find it interesting, I will correct a comma here, and then I’ll go in and be like, “Hey, it's making me take it out!” And so I'm like, okay, which one is it? And then I have to think about it for myself. But anyway, so I think it's funny, it makes me feel less bad about being bad with commas, because even word processors can't agree.

Rebecca: Same, yep.

Agnes: Okay, but I did want to ask about something else that you mentioned earlier, and that's formatting issues that we necessarily can't search for. What are your thoughts on that?

Rebecca: We are going to do an episode that really covers formatting more specifically, but there are some formatting things that you really have to read through in order to catch them or see them or fix them. So, the shortlist here that I suggest you keep an eye out for—and educate yourself on more if needed, I certainly had to learn about these things as I was writing my first novel and editing it—are, number one, is there always a paragraph break between two avatars speaking? If not, you need to add one in. Or, if you have too many paragraph breaks, where it's just one person doing an acting, you might need to remove some of those and have larger paragraphs for it to look right and flow right and things like that. Number two on the formatting list would be, make sure that you're adding a page break, not just a paragraph break, before every chapter header. This is for clarity, this is for cleanliness, and your readers will have an easier time noticing when a chapter change happens if you do that. Number 3 is, make sure that all of your scene breaks are marked and formatted correctly. I feel like I've already done an episode on this, but I can't really pull it up in my head, so make sure that it's 3 asterisks, center aligned, with a blank line above and below it. Number 4 on the list, and very much related to that, you need to remove any erroneous blank lines. Manuscripts being sent off to other people should not have extra blank lines between regular paragraphs. You can use it occasionally, so maybe once or twice a chapter as a soft scene break. We did that whole episode on that. But in general, you do not want a blank line in between paragraphs, and that might be a lot of this pass of going through and just deleting all of those blank lines.

Number 5 would be, make sure that all of your dialogue is in quotations. So, it has opening quotations at the beginning and closing quotations after the punctuation at the end, in most cases. And then last on my list here is, make sure that all of your internal thoughts, or internal dialogue, are italicized, not in quotations, and are phrased in first person and present tense as you're reading through.

Agnes: I feel like it's important to go over this, just because you've mentioned it several times, and so I want to go a little bit more in depth, but, one of the things that you said to watch for in our final read is to make sure it's always clear who is speaking or doing something. First, can you just clarify what exactly that means, and just kind of go a little bit more in-depth from what you already said?

Rebecca: Yes, so this connects back to the other point I made about making sure that each character has their own paragraph. If you're trying to show multiple characters speaking or doing things within one paragraph, it can be confusing about which character is saying and doing the thing, but even when you do have the paragraphs formatted correctly, where, let's say, Kate does this paragraph, and then Jimmy does that paragraph, and then so on and so forth, it still can be important to make sure that in this paragraph where Kate is speaking and doing things, her name appears in a way that makes it clear that she is the one speaking or taking an action. And this is intuitive for most authors. You probably don't need to stress about this. However, when you're reading through, just bear that in mind, and if you read a paragraph and you're like, “You know what? If I had written this, I'm not sure it would be clear who said this,” go ahead and just use a dialogue tag, use an action tag, use a description, something. to make it clear, hey, this passage is about this person, their words, and what they are doing.

Agnes: So, I know myself, I'm not quite to this stage, but I have a feeling that I will probably spend way too much time on this final read-through. So how long does this step usually take, or how long do you think it should normally take the average writer, and at what point should we just say, enough is enough, or dial back how much effort we are putting into it? Because I know that we could spend a lifetime doing this part.

Rebecca: Absolutely, and some writers choose to, and that's their choice to make. I think that… So, for myself, my final read usually takes about a week. But I work pretty quickly, so that's not going to be true for everyone. I think that for most authors saying that you have a month to do this final read-through would seem reasonable, again, just on average. And I think that's a great question to ask. At what point do you decide that you've gone past reasonable length or time or effort for this? The answer is essentially, when it starts either bogging you down, when it starts removing your motivation, your forward momentum, when it starts feeling like there's too long of a gap between issues that you're catching, so you have to read 5 chapters before you find another typo kind of thing. There's a whole myriad of different lines that you can draw for yourself. But I do very much recommend that you do draw a line for yourself. So, maybe for an individual, trying to watch these different layers of catching things you missed from previous rounds of editing, formatting, and speaker clarity trying to do all three is too much for one read-through, so maybe this does end up being three different final read-throughs for you. That's totally your call. And doing it that way might speed up the individual reads, but together, that might make it take 2 months, so I don't really have a concrete answer on this. But I do think that it is very valuable to think about, and make a call on for yourself when it feels like you need to.

Agnes: I don't mean to be very vague with this, but do you have any more advice or thoughts on this topic that you wanted to share that maybe I've missed?

Rebecca: Yeah. This stage in the self-editing process, as you're nearing the end and solidly into the polishing stages of self-editing, is where I do actually recommend printing out your full manuscript if you haven't done so already, and doing some markups with a pen, trying to consume it in that different way. Similarly, just do anything else that you can think of to really change the tangible aspects of how you are consuming your own writing. This could be just changing your font and type color or size, this could be changing your formatting, especially if you're having to do a lot of fixing around your formatting. That will change how it looks, and therefore change slightly how you perceive it. You can also just try changing what device you're reading it on. If you're typically working on your laptop, export it and try reading it on your phone, or a tablet, or your Kindle, something like that. And then lastly, If you haven't done audio up to this point, despite what a proponent of that I am, I suggest that at this point, this is where you bite the bullet and you try doing audio, because, again, consuming your story through your ears versus your eyes is going to be a big change in how your brain processes it, and will allow you to catch issues that you've missed a hundred times before now. One other fun trick that I'll mention right here for doing this last read polishing check is try reading your book backwards. Not word by word, that would be crazy-making, but paragraph by paragraph, starting at the end and working your way back up. The reason that this can be really helpful, at least in my experience, and I did pick this advice up from I think it was somebody I interviewed on this podcast last year, is that it helps break you out of the self-hypnosis of knowing what's coming next. When you're reading through in the order that you planned it and wrote it and have edited it dozens of times, your brain is predicting, and sometimes that prediction can prevent you from seeing the reality, because you're seeing what you expect, not what's there. When you try reading paragraph by paragraph backwards, it breaks that expectation and that pattern, and it can allow you to read your own work much more objectively, which is very helpful here.

Agnes: So, this may be a silly question, and I do want to just wrap up. This will be our last question. But do you recommend doing anything specifically at the end of the final read-through for self-editing?

Rebecca: Yes, celebrate. [both laughing] This is you being done with the arduous, overwhelming process of self-editing, so like I recommended you do when you finish drafting and break week, whatever. Celebrate. When you finish this book, when you get to the end, go out for drinks, make a post on social media, whatever celebrating means to you, do a little bit of, I did it, oh, I did it, oh, I did it, oh, I did it—and I say that because I failed to on my first couple of books and I regret that, because I never got the emotional reward for having gone through all of that, when all it would have taken is an hour of me choosing that option and telling myself, we're going to celebrate now. So, I very strongly recommend that.

Agnes: Well, thank you so much for your insight. It has helped me so much. Thank you.

Rebecca: Absolutely. Next week, we are going to do an audience requested episode for the first time and talk through some ways to get unstuck if you get hung up on an earlier step in this series or whatever your self-editing process is. For now, I want to wish all of our listeners a very happy Thanksgiving. I’m so incredibly grateful for everyone who listens in, comments, reaches out about their own self-editing adventures, and everything like that. I hope that you all have a fantastic holiday, and that your food comas are delightful. And see you all next week!

Agnes: Thank you so much!

Rebecca: Thank you so much for listening to the Hart Bound Editing Podcast. I look forward to bringing you more content to help you make your good story great so it can change lives and change your world. Follow along to hear more or visit my website, linked in the description, to learn how I can help you and your story to flourish.

See you next time!