You CAN'T Write a Good Book without THIS!

Oh my stars....can I just squeal for a second?  The last 48 hours have been so fantastic for me with editing my story.  Realizing that maybe I needed to amp up the end a bit, I had to raise the stakes, the characters have more to lose, and the certain consequences are less sure.  And a little tweak on ambiguity of one person's decision here, more clarity on another's choice there.  Will they stand in the protagonist's way?  Will they betray their oath?  It's gooooood :)  And I've been doing tons of work on verbiage, closing essential plot holes, etc. 

But I digress, topics for another day.  What's with the dramatic title?  Reading your book out loud. 

If you don't do it, THROW. YOUR. BOOK. IN. THE. BIN.  Seriously.  Or ya know, just stop what you're doing and start doing it now?

I'm on I think my 6th draft of my book?  Especially after editing a lot, things get a little blurry.  Changing to a more dynamic verb may have made your sentence choppy now.  You made a spelling error but it slipped past your usually sharp eyes.  I've used this tip at least twice now, and it has made the world of difference.

I catch silly things like repetitive words, and just gosh darn awful sentence structure or boring descriptions. 

It's super late at night and I'm tired so we're going to keep this short.  Just do it.  I find it helpful to actually print it out, but that's optional, and read it out loud.  Your ears pick up a lot that your eyes won't. 

This last time I actually let Microsoft Word read it to me (that's a thing!).  Super easy.  Of course inflection isn't perfect and there's some downright funny pronunciations by a basic computer, but I was shocked by how much having it read out loud to me made me see even more where I could improve, even after I had read it out loud to myself. 

So, to conclude, use the following steps:

1-Read your own manuscript out loud.
2-Have a computer read it out loud to you.
3-Have another real person read it to you (I'll do that down the road, make sure my punctuation gives the reader the impressions the way I intend for them to come across.)
4-Forgive any errors I made in this because my brain shut off an hour ago but I was still really excited about progress and wanted to share with y'all
5-Follow or bookmark or share this ;)
6-Have a fantastically wonderful day!


See?  Super easy!  Go get 'er done!