Most people associate editing with fixing punctuation and grammar mistakes, but it starts much earlier than that. In fact, if you start with the PUGS—punctuation, usage, grammar, and syntax—you’re wasting time (and money, if you hired a freelance editor) because you’ll have to do it again later after you’ve fixed the big-picture issues.

Editing a novel can be overwhelming. There are so many things to consider and process that it’s tempting to skip them completely to focus on the PUGS.

Don’t.

Instead, focus on the big-picture issues to make sure you have a strong story first. If you don’t have a strong story, it won’t matter how well-punctuated your book is—agents will reject it and readers will give up on it. Don’t tempt them! Start with these common novel problems.

Know Your Audience. Earlier this year, I talked about the importance knowing your audience (read about it here). Readers aren’t interested in what you want to tell them. They’re interested in their favorite genres. Make sure you know who your audience is so you can make sure your book meets their expectations.

A Structured Plot. James Scott Bell explains that readers appreciate structured stories because they’re familiar with them. They may not be able to identify the key components of a three-act plot, but they’re unconsciously looking for and expecting them when they read novels. If your story doesn’t have structure, it can confuse your reader.

The most basic and most used story structure is the three-act plot. Check your manuscript to make sure it includes all the necessary parts:

• Act I (introduction)
• Inciting Incident
• First Transition (what forces the main characters out of Act I and into Act II)
• Act II (where the story happens)
• Second Transition (what forces the main characters into Act III)
• Act III (conclusion)
• Satisfying and Appropriate Ending

Complex Characters. It doesn’t matter how unique your plot it—if the characters are boring or predictable, readers will stop reading. Characters need to complex (no stereotypes) and relatable. You readers don’t need to agree with everything your characters do, but they should at least understand why your characters do them.

To help achieve that, every main character needs a starting GMC: goal, motivation, and conflict.

• Goal: what your character wants to achieve.
• Motivation: why your character wants to achieve it.
• Conflict: what prevents your character from achieving it.

Strong GMCs are specific. It’s not enough to say your heroine wants to get married someday because she wants to start a family but she hasn’t found the right person. That describes millions of people. Instead, make it specific: she wants to get married for the security of having a second income because she was raised in a poor neighborhood by a single parent but she doesn’t love the men she’s met with good jobs.

To provide more depth to your main characters, I recommend starting with at least two GMCs. Either short-term and long-term or personal and professional. This will force you to think more deeply about your characters, which will give them more complex personalities and backstories.

Show It. All fiction writers have heard it—show, don’t tell. Most novelists I work with think they’re showing, but their manuscripts are full of telling. This isn’t a cure-all for telling in fiction, but there are two things you can look for to identify and re-write a lot of telling.

• Senses and Emotions. Anytime you name a sense or emotion, it’s telling. Searching for named senses (i.e. saw, heard, felt, etc.) will reveal places where you can rewrite a sentence to show something. She saw the bird outside becomes the bird flew outside. The same is true for emotions (i.e. happy, sad, mad, etc.). He felt angry can be shown as he punched the wall and growled.
• Long Paragraphs. If you have pages and pages of long paragraphs in your manuscript, I can almost guarantee there’s telling in there, especially if all of your chapters start with several long paragraphs. Whenever you see these big blocks with little white space, read the through them and ask yourself two questions—is this information relevant and is it explaining something that happened before the book starts? If it’s not relevant, cut it. If it’s relevant but explaining something from the character’s past, cut it for now and look for ways to include it later in the story in an active way (dialogue is a great tool).

By starting with these four big-picture issues first, you’ll have a better story to pitch to agents or a cleaner manuscript to submit to a freelance editor, which will save you time and money.

What’s your greatest struggle when editing your own manuscript?

For more tips, connect with me online at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!