Candid Carets

You’ve finished your 80,361-word novel, and it’s a masterpiece. You’re considering using Simon and Schuster’s or Amazon Kindle to publish your work.

       Stop the presses!

       You are only ready to start doing the challenging work of ridding your work of its faults. J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, and Earnest Hemingway didn’t publish any of their books without editing them, by themselves, and then by professionals.

       No writer of any skill or self-respect is willing to submit their first draft to a publisher without seriously reviewing their work, polishing its storylines, flushing out characters, and eliminating the spelling and grammatical errors that exist in any book that only the author has seen.

       Nevertheless, many writers face the same dilemma, “How do I go about editing my story?”

       Self-editing must consider checking grammar usage, correcting misspellings, and ensuring that a character is not named Anne Austin in one place, Ann Austen in another, and Annie Auston elsewhere.

       Yet, the question remains: How can you effectively eliminate misspellings and inconsistencies in the names of people, structures, places, or anything else?

       Candid Carets, LLC will provide you with a logical framework to prepare your written work so it will appeal to readers, not just because it’s a great story, not just because your characters are fascinating and believable, or because everything is correctly spelled.

       Readers want stories that don’t have holes – spaces in which the reader can tell something is missing that is essential to their understanding and interest. They don’t want wording or misused grammar that snags, annoys, or confuses them. They want word choice and punctuation that makes the story and dialogue interesting and move the story forward. Disruptions take readers out of the story in which they were immersed and force them to confront the fault and reason their way through what the author meant. That takes them out of the story, distracts them, causes them to lose interest, and you lose the audience you need.

       This blog and its website will help you through self-editing as you move from writing the novel to preparing it for editing by professional editors and proofreaders for their corrections.

       Take this blog as an example. I ran it through MS Word and Grammarly and made 36 recommended changes. 

       I hope you find it fresh, frank (candid), and full of the craft of self-editing.

Jonathan