Self-editing guide · prose checksSelf-edit your novel, one pass at a time.

Start with the shape of the book. Is every chapter pulling its weight, in the right place, at the right length? Changes here move whole scenes, so make them before anything else.

Want to hold your book up against a well-known plot structure? Story structures explains seven of them, and where the turns of each one fall.

1. Check that Bird’s Eye found your chapters and scenes. If it didn’t, set the heading levels yourself.
2. Look at each chapter’s length against your target, and under Characters at who’s been gone too long.
3. Run pass 1 on the whole book. It goes chapter by chapter.
4. Rewrite, move or cut what isn’t working, then tick the chapter.

Chapters that stand out

No style guide gives a number for how much one chapter may differ from the next, so Falcontext compares each chapter’s sentence length and dialogue with the rest of your own book. Standing out on purpose is fine: the fight, the escape, the quiet chapter after. A chapter in the middle that crawls without you meaning it to is the one to look at.

Openings that stall

Elmore Leonard’s first rule is “Never open a book with weather”, and Les Edgerton’s Hooked warns against “Opening With a Dream” and “Opening With an Alarm Clock Buzzing”. Their advice is about a book’s first page, but it holds for every chapter: start where something happens.

Characters who vanish

Bring them back sooner, or ask whether the book needs them. Killed someone off? Mark it, and Falcontext stops flagging them.

Now go scene by scene: who’s telling it, and how the characters talk. Browne and King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers gives this three chapters of its twelve: Point of View, Dialogue Mechanics and Easy Beats.

1. Pick pass 2. Next up shows the first scene still to do.
2. Start with tense and point of view, then the dialogue.
3. Fix or ignore each finding. The scene’s box fills as you go, and ticks itself once its lights are green.

Slips in tense or point of view

A paragraph in the present tense in a past-tense book, or an “I” in a third-person one, is a slip a spell checker won’t see. Put it back in your book’s way, or ignore it if the change is on purpose.

Fancy tags

Leonard again: “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue”. Or Stephen King: “while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.” Published authors use “said” “over 60% of the time”, ProWritingAid found. Go back to “said”, or let an action carry the line.

Speeches that run on

Break them with a beat (someone moves, looks away, pours a drink), a reaction from whoever’s listening, or a question that changes direction. Unless the speech is the scene: a confession, a story within the story. Then let it run.

How much dialogue?

There’s no right share. Mark Liberman measured about half of The Great Gatsby in quotation marks and 3% of To the Lighthouse. So Falcontext only flags the far ends.

Slips in what happens

Someone stands up when they were already standing, or their eyes are green in chapter 2 and blue in chapter 19. Fixing that can mean rewriting part of a scene, so catch it here, before you polish the scene’s sentences. A change you meant, like dyed hair, you can ignore.

More than what they see

A scene told only through what the character sees can feel thin. A sound, a smell, something to touch puts the reader in the room. Falcontext shows how much of each sense a scene draws on.

With the scenes in place, the line edit starts: how each sentence reads, and how they sound together. This is where reading aloud earns its keep. Browne and King suggest you “try reading the passage aloud, listening carefully for any little changes you’re inclined to make while reading.” Or let your computer read it to you: “You will catch typos, repetition, draggy passages, and confusion.”

1. Pick pass 3: scene by scene, or only today’s changes if you’re revising as you go.
2. Read each flagged stretch aloud before you touch it.
3. Fix what sounds wrong. Ignore what you meant.

Passive voice that hides who’s acting

Orwell’s rule was “Never use the passive where you can use the active”, but novels don’t follow it to the letter: the middle of the 38 published books I measured had 5.5 per 1,000 words. It’s right when the doer is unknown or the point (“The body was found at dawn”), or when a character is dodging blame (“Mistakes were made”). Otherwise, name who does it.

Sentences that drone

Gary Provost’s famous lesson starts “This sentence has five words” and ends with the music of varied lengths. Where four sentences in a row run the same length, join two, or cut one in half. A sentence of 35 words or more is worth a second read.

“-ing” openers

Strunk’s rule: “A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.” And the -ing says “at the same time”: turning while opening a door behind you can’t happen at once. Make it two actions.

Walls of text

Break a long paragraph where the focus shifts, where time jumps, or before the line you want to land hardest.

Readability

Fiction scores “in the range 70 < Score < 90” on Flesch’s reading ease, Flesch found. The middle of my 38 books scored 76.4. Only a very low score is worth a look.

Now the words themselves, and the ones you lean on. In each check, the words you use most come first, with their counts, and every one is marked in your text.

1. Pick pass 4, and work down the page.
2. Change the ones that weaken the sentence.
3. Keep the ones you love: ignore them, there or everywhere.

Adverbs

Stephen King believes “the road to hell is paved with adverbs”, but even the sparest writers use them: Ben Blatt counted 80 per 10,000 words for Hemingway and 128 for Austen. Swap the verb (“ran quickly” → “sprinted”), cut the filler (“really tired” → “tired”), and keep the ones that change the meaning: “she almost smiled” isn’t “she smiled”.

Filter words

John Gardner wanted “she noticed” and “she saw” “suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen”. Cut the filter and keep what’s seen, or put the feeling in the body (“He felt cold” → “His fingers wouldn’t close”). A character who realises something too late still needs that “realised”.

Telling emotions

“In scenes, events are seen as they happen rather than described after the fact,” write Browne and King. “She was angry” is after the fact: show it in what she does. A quick “she was tired” is fine where the moment doesn’t matter.

Clichés and padding

Orwell: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” And Strunk’s weak construction, “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground”, says more as “Dead leaves covered the ground.”

Your crutch words

Everyone has them. Mine is “even”: 256 times in one book. Falcontext shows the words you use at least twice as often as published fiction, and the synonym checker finds another word.

Last: the copyedit and the proofread. Start this pass only when you’ve stopped rewriting, or you’ll be proofreading twice.

1. Turn on Final draft, above the checks: every light gets a quarter stricter, for polishing.
2. Run pass 5 on the whole book.
3. Use Fix for one finding, or Fix all for every one like it, in Google Docs, Atticus, WordPress, Ellipsus and Perch’s writing pad. In the desktop app, Falcontext finds them and you fix them yourself.
4. Read the homophones one by one: those aren’t in Fix all, because each needs your eyes.

One way, all the way

Copyeditors keep a style sheet so the book makes every choice the same way throughout. In the words of Chicago’s editors: “If it’s 11:00 a.m. in chapter 1, it shouldn’t be 2 PM in chapter 3. That’s what style sheets are for.” Falcontext keeps that sheet for you: spelling, names, quotation marks, dashes and ellipses each go the way your book mostly goes. Which way is up to you: Chicago closes up its em dashes where British style spaces en dashes, Chicago spaces its ellipses where AP shoves them together, and for spelling, Chicago editors “pick the first-listed term” in Merriam-Webster.

Dialogue punctuation

A tag follows? End the line with a comma, inside the quotation marks, and start the tag small: “Hello,” she said. That’s Chicago style. A question or exclamation keeps its mark, with no comma. An action isn’t a tag, so it gets a full stop: “Hello.” She smiled. In Google Docs, Atticus, WordPress, Ellipsus and the writing pad, Fix puts them right for you.

Typos a spell checker can’t see

“Their going” and “poured over the map” are spelled right. In my proofreading test of 40 sentences with 28 such mistakes, Google Docs caught 19, Word 21 and Falcontext 23. So when the checks are done, read it once more yourself.