2 Ways to Make Your Book More Powerful As Fast As Possible

Your time is precious. You've already spent months maybe even years working on your novel.

You want to make it the best it can be in as little time as possible. You've got other things to do, other stories to write, and the rest of your life to live. So how can you make your book better as fast as possible and in only two steps?

Cut Over Used Words

That neat little Find and Replace feature that most writing processors come with is about to become your very best friend.

When I start editing a chapter the first thing I do is go to the find and replace section, type in the word "really" and start deleting. Outside of dialogue this word really isn't needed. It doesn't add anything but a bulked-up word count.

Other words you should be searching for include:

• very
• like
• just
• actually
• kind of
• sort of
• maybe
• actually
• literally
• basically

If your character is a teenager from the early 2000s, these words are fine to keep in the dialogue, but otherwise, these words are filler and add no real depth to your novel.

You should also be on the lookout for those pesky "Be" verbs. However, unlike the previous list, you're not just going to search for these and delete them. Instead, they'll need to be changed.

• Is
• Am
• Are
• Was
• Were
• Be
• Being
• Been

While these words are not always bad, most of the time they can be replaced with more powerful verbs to give your novel a bit more power.

It's also possible that you overused other words in your writing such as repeating a descriptive word multiple times in the same passage.

Their eyes were blue - you only need to say it once or twice before it will feel like your narrator is obsessed with their eyes - unless they are. 

The best way to catch these is to move on to step two.

Read It Out Loud

Reading out loud is the number one way to improve your novel and spot mistakes and changes that need to be made as fast as possible.

Or even better sit there with your manuscript in front of you and have a text-to-speech reader read it to you.

You may skip over certain things and begin to skim through passages, but the robot reader won't.

Having it read to you will have those awkward sentences sticking out like sore thumbs and help you mark down where things may be a bit unclear.

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Editing a novel can sometimes take twice as long as writing it did and that's ok. You want your work to be the best that it can possibly be, but it's also ok to want to shave some of that time off and move on to the next step.

These two tricks are easy enough to complete over the course of a few hours to a few days, but they will almost immediately help you improve your novel.

Best of luck.

With love,

B.K. xo xo

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This story was originally posted on Medium.

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