Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 2: Editing Checklist, Style Sheet, and Cheat Sheet for Continuity

Heyo writers and readers. Welcome back to the second part of the “Fool-Proofing” Guide. In the first part of the guide, we spoke about the need for editing and the major blockade that comes with self-editing—generalization and the psychology of typos. In this part, I will take you through the process I use to ensure consistency and continuity throughout my prose as well as the first 3 steps I use for Fool-Proofing.

To start off, let’s go over the tools I’ll be talking about and using for this part of the guide.

Cheat Sheet
Style Sheet
Editing Checklist
Grammarly

Tool #1: Cheat Sheet

Efficient editing starts before you finish a piece of writing. A novel is a container for a massive amount of data arranged into conceptual ideas/concepts. It’s a lot to keep track of and the best way to do this is a cheat sheet/style sheet as you write the novel. There are many ways to do this, but I find a document arranged into tables that I call my cheat sheet the easiest and most time-saving. It’s easily accessible and contains important details in categories. For example, we can see part of my cheat sheet for Future Furious to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

The table in the image above is specifically for characters, but the cheat sheet also contains a table each for.

Places: With subcategories for places in the city, the planet, businesses, etc…
Products: With subcategories for drugs, drinks, tech, food, vehicles, etc…
Phrases / Jargon / Vernacular: With subcategories for insults, Southernisms, etc…
Events: With subcategories for holidays, wars, operations, etc…
Species: With subcategories for insects, animals, flora, etc…

All in all, it’s a vast collation of terms and important ideas that are easily accessible that you will continue to fill in as you write for continuity purposes. This is a massive time AND frustration saver, and I highly recommend every story have one. While I don’t specifically use this cheat sheet as an actual step within the “Fool-Proofing” system, I still end up using it for quick reference when I’m editing, which is why I am including this as a tool.

Tool #2: Style Sheet

While the cheat sheet is a massive time saver for when you are actually writing the novel, it differs from the style sheet I use when I get down and dirty into my editing phase. However, the process is still the same as the cheat sheet. I keep this document open as I’m writing the novel and when I come across something I’m not sure how I want to spell or name or whatever, I quickly add it to this list to make sure I check it for consistency during the final editing process. This happens when something doesn’t feel quite right and I check a style guide or an online resource, or when I want to change a character’s name or a place halfway through the book. And sometimes, if it is pertaining to grammar or mechanics, it comes down to personal style choice. For instance, are you going to use a space after your ellipsis… or…no space? Well, there isn’t really a right answer. However, there is a wrong one. And that would be to use a space after some ellipses and no space after other ellipses. When it comes to style, CONSISTENCY is the name of the game. Some common things I add to my style sheet are:

Words that have a funky spelling or have more than one spelling.
Names (especially if changed or uncommon)
Terms
Style (Like the aforementioned ellipsis)
Dates and Times
etc…

Side note: There are different ways to create style sheets. In terms of what you should use, it really depends on what works for you. I find my approach easy, quick, and accessible. Maybe not super pretty, but hey, it works for me and that’s what matters. If you want to do it a different way, more power to you.

Tool #3: Editing Checklist

Part of the editing checklist I have specifically compiled for myself I actually came across at https://jerryjenkins.com/self-editing/. As this isn’t my actual work, so I will not explain it in detail but strongly suggest checking it out or downloading it for free.

While this guide has many delicious editing nuggets to check for, and what will be useful for you specifically is user-dependent, what I use from it is:

Delete up and down, except where necessary.
Delete that, except when necessary for clarity.

Side note: On my actual checklist document, I have other nuggets from this guide. However, I use them as reminders as something to keep an eye out for in the further steps of this guide as opposed to issues I will actively search a document for as we will do in steps 2 and 3 below.

Along with these items, I also use a list of trouble words excerpted from the first chapter of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing that I ran across on The Write Life. Depending on your grammar proficiency, you may want to expand this list. However, I find for my purposes, this list is perfect.

a lot/alot
affect/effect
can/may
further/farther
good/well
i.e./e.g.
into/in to
it’s/its
lay/lie
less/fewer
that/who
their/they’re/there
then/than
who/whom
your/you’re

Alright, now that we have our tools ready to go, let’s get into the first few steps of the “Fool-Proofing” system.

Fool-Proofing: Step 1 – Spell Check!!!

Open your document (I highly suggest one chapter per document for organizational and ease of use purposes). Once open, use the free Grammarly app! It’s incredibly useful AND free! (It’s not gonna solve all your editing problems, which is why this guide has 4 parts, but it is an incredible tool as seen in the image below.)

Give your chapter a once over with the app then move on to step number 2.

Fool-Proofing: Step 2 – Checklist

Step number 2 is easy-peasy. For this step, you check your checklist for the first item and use your word processor’s search function (Ctrl + F) then systematically check for each issue. In the picture below, we can see a very rough draft I’m working on. By using the search function, I have instantly located all the instances of the word down in the document. If I were editing this, I would examine each instance and quickly analyze it for its necessity. If it’s unnecessary, delete it. If it is necessary, there might be a better way of conveying the idea you may want to use. This is up to you to decide (see what I did there?).

Once you’ve gone through each instance of up and down, move on to the next item on your checklist. In my case, I would check all instances of that for necessity. The process is the same, use the (Ctrl + F) search function and input that into the search field, then analyze each instance. Which, in many cases, is just not needed. However, don’t just delete all instances of that as sometimes it is necessary.

From there, move on to the trouble words list and keep moving down the items of your checklist until it’s finished. This might take a bit of time for the first couple of chapters. But after a few, it’s relatively quick and then you can move on to the next steps for Fool-Proofing.

Fool-Proofing: Step 3 – Style Sheet Consistency

This is essentially the same as the previous step. However, you are using the style sheet as opposed to the editing checklist. The process is the same, use the search function and systematically move down the item list of your style sheet to check for consistency/continuity of the words/names/terms/style/dates/eye color/etc… you previously committed to using.

Side note: I started out doing step 3 for each chapter, but it soon became a time-consuming chore and an unnecessary one at that. Due to this, I now save this super important step for the very last step of the editing process after I have collated all the chapters for either each part of the book or the complete manuscript into one document. This way, I am not checking every chapter for the fifty or more items.

Nice! You should now have a document that is consistent and ready for the next two nitty-gritty steps in the process, the free editing app treatments.

That’s the end of Part 2 for the Fool-Proofing guide. Join us next time when we dive into “Fool-Proofing Part 3: The Free Editing App Treatment.” Until then, happy writing and word wrangling!