You are finished writing your book. You finally get to write “The End.”

Now all you have to do is send it off and get published, right?

No!

Before you send your work off to an editor or agent, you will need to edit your work. You want to send off only the most complete, polished project. That doesn’t mean you should delay sending it off by editing it over and over or working on it for so long tht you totally lose sight of the original story. What you want to do is look for plot holes, grammatical errors and typos.

Editing can be almost as difficult as the original writing. Authors handle it in a variety of ways. Some will put down their manuscripts once they are finished and then not pick it up for days or weeks before they begin the editing process.

Others will print it out and read it like a reader all the way through before going back and starting to fix the problem parts. Others will mark emotional passages or action passages in different colors of marking pens so they can go back through and improve their pacing. If you didn't use a story board form or plot point form as you wrote your book you might want to go back and fill one out now to check your pacing.

Whatever method you choose to use, you should go through and check for certain things like spelling, grammar, correct punctuation, and word usage. As you read through your book, always be on the look out for ways to trim your work and make it more readable. Keep a checklist of problem areas to look for in your manuscript or traps that you find yourself falling into on a repeated basis. This will help give you an idea of what you need to fix.

You might do your editing with a dictionary at your side to look up words that you are not quite certain about. You should also keep a pile of sticky notes handy to mark questionable pages that you want to come back and fix later. Of course you will also want to use a red pen to mark sentences or make comments on what needs be fixed.

Some writers edit with a note pad next to them, writing down the pages where they have questions and noting what needs to be checked or fixed. For your convenience we have provided a form called Edit Notes which you can print out and use for keeping track of things you need to go back and fix.

Look for plot holes or scenes that don't make sense and might be cut. Check to see if you need to add a scene to make a later scene or event make sense. Again, list it in your edit notes so you can remember to fix it later.

Finally, you might want to check out our Editing Tips for some of the common editing problems.

Exercises for editing:

• Read through the first few pages of your story aloud
• Look for redundant words or phrases
• If you find any words you are using over and over, put them in the "Search and Replace" function of your word processor and change or discard
• Look for unnecessary dialogue tags - put said or asked into the "search and replace" function and see if they are necessary