Finding Tips on Self-Editing at The Blood-Red Pencil

First published on July 14, 2010, this post is one of the most useful we've ever offered! Thank you to Patricia Stoltey.

Most of us who write spend as much time in the revision and self-editing phase as we do writing our first drafts. Since a large percentage of the contributors to this blog are editors, there's a lot of information here to help. Now that we've added a search bar, it's easy to find what you're looking for, whether it be advice on using adjectives and adverbs or different points of view on point of view.

To give you a head start, here are the links to my series, Self-Editing One Step at a Time:

1. Charting the Novel Story Arc

2. How to Identify Dragging Narrative

3. Identifying and Eliminating Your Habit Words

4. Searching for More Silly Stuff

5. Weeding Out Unnecessary Adjectives and Adverbs

6. Cleaning Up Those Dialogue Tags

7. Analyzing Sentences for Redundancy and Wordiness

8. Fine-Tuning Sentence Structure

9. Read Your Manuscript Aloud

10. One Final Self-Editing Chore

11. Critique Groups Part I

12. Critique Groups Part II


When I used the search box to look for "self-editing," I found more, including these:

Alex Sokoloff's guest post from June, 2009 is called: Top Ten Things I Know About Editing.

Lillie Amman's post from September, 2008 is Ten Tips for Self-Editing.

You can do the same kind of search for "adjectives," "adverbs," "dialogue," or any other element of writing to see what the authors and editors have written. If you don't find what you want, check the  Ask the Editor free-for-all and post your question or suggest a new post topic.

Patricia Stoltey is the author of two amateur sleuth mysteries, The Prairie Grass Murders and The Desert Hedge Murders. Originally published in hardcover by Five Star and paperback by Harlequin Worldwide, both are now available as e-books for Kindle and Nook. Her November 2014 novel from Five Star/Cengage, Dead Wrong is a standalone suspense. The novel has been described as “…lightning paced…” and “…a fantastic combination of suspense and action…”

You can learn more about Patricia and her fiction at her website and blog. She can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.