4 Editing Techniques to Empower Your Story

After you’ve written your first draft of your story it’s time for editing.

Sometimes editing can be the most painful part of getting your book out into the world. I get it.

Honestly, editing is the part of the process I struggle with most. Most of the time I feel like pulling out my hair as I read through my manuscript line-by-line.

But, this week I’m happy to tell you that rewriting my novel actually became somewhat less-stressful. I know – I’m super surprised too.

I’ll explain what happened. I discovered some helpful tips reading through a couple of editing books – like Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King –  and I also learned so much from Margie Lawson that has been a turnaround in my understanding of how to edit and rewrite a book better.

These editing ideas – from bestselling authors – I hope will help enhance your writing and make your book into a page-turner that readers will love.

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Digging deeper into the details of your story…

When writers first start out, it can be difficult to see editing as a good investment. But I’ve learned that every step you take to make your story better will enhance your finished product, please more readers and will help you get better reviews and sales.

There are many different types of editing where you get paid help from professionals with your book – structural edits, copy edits, beta readers, proofreaders – but in this blog post, I want to talk about self-editing techniques that you can do on your own – learned from bestselling authors – to make your book hard to put down.

These editing techniques aren’t meant to change your style or writing or your writing voice… only to empower your story.

So, step out bravely and try something new – it’s what I’ve been doing too and I feel like it’s changing my story in amazing ways 🙂

4 Tips to Edit Your Book

1.Learn how to backload your sentences with Power words. Simply put, backloading is taking the one word that is the most important in your sentence, paragraph or scene and putting that word at the end.

Examples of Power words are: spectacular; harsh; fierce, fear, shock, nude, obsessing, madness, violence, furious, slapped, irritated, self-absorbed, etc.

These words are used to pick up the pace of your story and they add greater emotion to your scenes. But, you don’t want to backload every sentence with a Power word because it will end up losing its’ power. But adding a power word to every scene will help to create a page turning book.

At Hidden Falls by Barbara Freethy has this paragraph that backloaded with a power word.

For a second, he’d felt a ripping fear that he might not want to let her go, either. Which was crazy, because where women were concerned, he always let go first. The only time he hadn’t had ended in painful disaster.

The word ‘disaster’ is a power word that conjures up thoughts of foreshadowing and tension in the reader.

Practice circling the last word in each sentence, paragraph and scene in your book and see what you have. If you find a common or predictable word or phrase, change it to a power word. That’s what I’ve been working on and it’s already making a big difference.

2.Try using Anaphora in your sentences. This is where you repeat a word or phrase at the beginning of three(or more) clauses or sentences. The first three words or phrases that you repeat in a row builds tension.

That’s what Brenda Novak did in her book Stop Me.

She had to get out. Before someone realized what she’d discovered. Before the man who’d locked her in here returned. Before she wound up rotting in a shallow grave like the corpse staring sightlessly back at her.

Those three sentences that begin with “before” build incredible tension in the reader and makes you want to read faster so you can see what’s going to happen next.

Anaphora is great to use to enhance a feeling, a thought or a point. There’s great rhythm and power when you use this editing technique to build tension in your story.

To practice adding anaphora to my manuscript, I’ve created a new blank document and I do a copy and paste of the paragraphs or sentences where I this editing technique would work. Try it out. You might be surprised at how well it works.

3.Practice using Asyndeton in your phrases. This is where you cut out conjunctions – for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so, either, neither – between words and phrases. Usually, it happens in a list of three or more.

When you use Asyndeton it makes your sentence or paragraph sound more climatic.

For example, Suzanne Collins uses it when she shares backstory in The Hunger Games.

He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.

You can see there’s no ‘and/or/so’ used in the above sentence. It does build momentum in the sentence.

4.Try using Polysyndeton in a few sentences. This editing technique uses many conjunctions. For example, use the words ‘and’ or ‘or’ several times in the same sentence without using any commas between them. Doing this packs an emotional wallop for the reader.

For example: He ran for miles and miles and miles.

If you took out the last four words, the sentence wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

An example from the book I’m editing, Anchoring Annaveta.

Whoever was at the door knocked and knocked and knocked, but no one answered.

That’s another idea to practice when you edit your book.

I hope you find these 4 ideas useful as you edit your book.

I think these unique ways to create tension and build excitement, have already made my book more interesting.

I’m practicing and experimenting with these editing ideas too. It’s definitely been an eye-opener on how to write a book that will grab the reader so they don’t let go until they’ve read the end.

That’s what all us authors want, right? 🙂

What are some editing ideas you’ve found helpful? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments – we can help each other!

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