Skeletor, Master of Edits. · 11:25pm Jul 30th, 2021
The Prologue was originally…. 1,700 words. Now that I’ve edited it, it’s… 1,600. Progress for editing!
On one hand, I feel like it reads better now, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little sad to see all those horse words disappear.
I really like numbers, and Word Count, to me, just feels like a new score to aim for most of the time. Seeing it shrink by a few hundred points kinda hurts. Anyway, for anyone who may be curious, I stumbled across an editing website called Word Tune, a free online service that actually, ya know, edits.
I tried Grammerly for a while, and... I dunno, it just feels like a pretentious program. Like, if it was a person I'd describe them as being pretentious. I never tried the premium features, so maybe it's actually really good. All I know is that Word Tune actually offered ideas instead of just saying, "We can fix this, but pay us money."
I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a free online editing program. Not all of it's suggestions are perfect, but I was able to cherry pick a few nice words here and there.
Editing sucks, but at least you learn from it how to improve. Well worth it in the long run.
I personally use Grammarly but the way I use it is either big brain or... not so big brain. I copy and paste each paragraph into the Grammarly document separately, then if you show all suggestions, it tells you what errors can be fixed by premium. Most importantly, it tells you what sort of error it is. You can then research what causes that error and how to solve it. This means you have to play around with the paragraph in the document so it isn't identified as an error anymore.
I do this with every paragraph that has that yellow highlight in it, which is a long and painful process if you have a lot of errors or you're editing a long story/chapter -- even worse if both. But you quickly learn what causes the errors this way and they will appear less in your future writing, saving editing time.
All this is done without having to splash out on premium. It only costs you time.
Man, all that editing must have been a real pain in the ass.
Also I might used Word Tunes myself god only knows that I need to make sure my grammar and spelling needs to be clean and tidy. And overall decent for the readers.
Sure I do mostly story idea notes and rough drafts. But still that's no excuse for sloppy spelling and grammar.
I still think you should first finish the story and then edit the chapter for cohesion and to keep focus, but who am I to tell you how to do it.
You have to really be careful with rewrites before the story is finished, and here is why. When an Author puts a story into hiatus saying, "Hey guys, I'm going back and fix some things, then I'll get back on the new stuff" ... That story is dead 90% of the time.
Here is why. When you're writing new chapters, there is a giddiness, a feeling of accomplishment, then you publish the chapter and wait in anticipation for the feedback from your readers. There is a real sense of creativity, followed by accomplishment. When an Author rewrites pre-existing chapters, its work. No real creativity and after updating the chapters you get hardly any feedback at all. Writing becomes a chore and after a while the Author gets sick of the story and burns out. From that point, the story is basically dead. My advice to Authors is to always finish the story first.
Monk
“You’re right. Violence is never the answer.” “Violence is the question.” “And the Answer is YES.” -Illua