Anyone who has written stories knows that they have to go back and proofread their work. After doing quite a bit of this, I thought I would give my thoughts and opinions on this process, none of which was found in any definitive works of how to go about this.
The first draft of any creative piece of work I’m writing is usually done without any regard to proofreading. That is because my thoughts are on what is happening in my story.
When I do that first proofread, I usually find tons of errors. Once I’ve finished, I don’t bother trying to go back and re-read what I’ve just edited, because I know that my brain is going to gloss over most of it, as it is still fresh in my mind.
Since I have several stories that I am working on, I will usually move on to a completely different project when I finish that proofread, eventually returning to it over time.
The first proofread is for basic grammar and typos and making sure that I have some basic coherent thought. When writing, I might duplicate words, almost as if my brain was stuck on a certain word. I am sometimes aware of this when I’m writing and sometimes I’m not. It doesn’t matter to me, because I know I will be able to fix it later.
Here is an example of what I mean: He was glad to be back home. It had been three long years since he had been back home and he was happy to be home.
During the proofreading process I might change this something like: He was glad to be back home. It had been three long years since he had been here.
The second home was changed to here and the “happy to be back home” phrase is eliminated because he was glad to be back.
I tend to use a lot of contractions during first draft. Would’ve, could’ve and should’ve might sound ok in speech, but in character thought, I tend to change these during proofreading to would have, could have and should have. I also check for overuse of he’d, she’d, they’d and other contractions like I’ll, I’m, etc.
Another problem is the use of set and sat. Keep in mind that things are set down. People sit down. John sat down on the sofa. John set his books down on the table. Sometimes when I’m writing, I get these crossed up, and I have to check for these and correct them in proofreading.
So that I don’t forget all of the things to look for, I have created a list of tendencies that I have, then use it as a checklist when conducting a proofread, using the find feature to root out every instance of d’ve, for example, then fix them and move on to the next item.
After this first proofread is done, I move on to something else, but when I make it back around to the story, I try and ensure that intellectually, I haven’t done anything stupid in my story, like make historical errors if the story is historically accurate, or by leaving dangling characters or things in the story that are left incomplete or that I failed to account for later on. An example might be coming up with a sideline story of a character that is no longer mentioned, but gave the hint in the story that this character would be heard from again.
My stories usually have a lot of action going in them, which can be hard to keep track of, and that means a proofread to make sure that there aren’t any of these kind of errors in the story, which can sometimes happen when you’re in a creative mode. A good way to avoid this when writing is when you put a future item you want to write about, to put in a placeholder in your document, so that when you get there you will remember to do it, but that doesn’t always happen.
Once this is done, it is time to add in descriptive details to give the reader some visual candy to add color to the story. I’m typically not worried about what the details surrounding a character are, preferring to let the reader use their imagination, but I do like to give them some basics to go by.
This includes not only character descriptions, but also things in a room, the weather conditions and similar items. It is important to take these details seriously and note them somewhere, or at the very least, go back and refer to them so that I don’t make a stupid mistake and describe something totally different the next time.
A good example would be someone’s hair color. I wrote about a character that was a brunette, then somewhere in the course of my writing, began to think of the character as a blonde, and when I finally discovered that mistake, I had to go back and fix the occurrences where this was mentioned.
The same goes for details of the character’s genealogy, which should be written down somewhere for reference purposes. Some of my stories only contain a few characters, making this an easy task, but several of them are long, complicated and have dozens of characters, and taking the time to organize everything in advance, adding and updating as you go along, saves having some grief later.
Emotions and speech are other areas that should be proofread separately. This doesn’t mean I gloss over things during the first proofread, but rather make a special pass through the story for the dialogue and see if the speech flows naturally, usually saying the speech parts out loud. Each character is different, so I try and make sure that they are in character to how they would typically speak. Some use certain words and idioms, giving them some consistency and believability.
Finally, when I’m done with all of that, I will go back and do a complete proofread, looking for typos, grammar and readability. You might think that all of the mistakes would be squashed by now, but you would be surprised at how many are still lurking about.
Blogs are somewhat different, of course. For these, I write out the blog, then go back and read over it once or twice and publish it, and if there are some typos or grammar mistakes, I’ll edit it later.
This is a process that has been refined over time, and I hope that some of this helps another aspiring writer out there.