Stay Focused: Finding those little errors that annoy your readers most

Hi guys! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. :) As you surely know, this month we’re talking about doing those dreaded edits on our precious first drafts.

We’ve been discussing the grammatical fixes and some of the big fixes, and now it’s time to get into one of the more difficult ones. This one, in fact, is one that takes so much focus that you probably won’t find all of them the first time through. You’re more likely to find them on the second or third time through your manuscript, or even during the final stages of editing—all because they’re so hard to locate that we don’t always see they’re there (and yet for some reason, readers always find them in a single read-through).

Continuity Errors (Sometimes called “small plot holes”)

Where the big holes we talked about the other day are large, straight up *holes* in the plot, these are those little details that point out the fact that this story isn’t real. And they’re a pain in the behind to find and remove, if I’m being honest.

Essentially, these are the errors for which you’ll have to be paying complete and utter attention to what you’re doing. These are the reason why you can’t be lax while you’re editing, why you can’t let your concentration slip for even a few minutes. Why? Because these errors are silly, small, and very important to remove—and because by leaving them in, your story looks sloppy and like you probably don’t really know what you’re doing.

None of us wants that.

In fact, it’s highly likely that a few of these will remain in your story, even when it’s published. And it’s highly likely that these will annoy a few of your readers. But, it’s also highly likely that if you’re doing your job right, many readers won’t even notice these oopses.

But how do we find them in the first place? That’s simple, but not very easy. You’ll have to read your manuscript more than once, during your first round of edits. You’ll probably have to read it so much that you won’t want to read it anymore, that you’ll be tired of it and don’t really want to publish it now anyway. Or you’ll just know it like the back of your hand and will know how to answer any question your readers pose to you. Either option is likely. Either option is completely reasonable. Either option ends in a desired way: you know your story, and you know you’ve fixed as much as you can.

All this to say, while you’re editing, I need you to be paying attention. Your story needs you to be paying attention, to be watching closely and overseeing every single piece of text within its pages. You owe it to your story, to put in the work.

Find those little tiny errors, those offhanded remarks, phrases, and statements that break what’s going on in the story. And then remove them.

Nice thing is, these are usually so small that the fix is as easy as can be.

[love]

{Rani Divine}