By Alycia Morales @AlyciaMorales

For the past two months, we’ve discussed spring cleaning our physical offices and our virtual offices. This month, let’s talk about how we can clean up our writing.

Are you writing what you love?

The first thing we need to do is to determine if we’re writing what we should be writing or if we’re just trying something because it sounds like a good idea. As career writers, we aspire to earn an income from our writing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if we’re writing a bunch of stuff that we don’t truly care about, are we really stewarding our writing well?

There are plenty of ways to make money as a writer, and not all of them are by writing. So why waste our talents on writing something we’re not passionate about when we could be earning an income writing what we love and pairing it with something else we know to do that we are equally as passionate about? For example, I work as a freelance editor (writing related, but I’m not writing – unless notes count – when doing this) and book/writing coach. This provides me with an income source while I write romantic suspense and dream of writing for children (because I want to diversify and do both).

Ask yourself:

1. Am I writing what I want to be writing?
2. If not, what could I do to supplement my writing income so I’m free to write what I’m passionate about writing?

If you are writing what you love, let’s take a look at how to clean up your work:

Formatting:

You may not realize it yet, depending on where you are in your writing career, but there’s a formula for formatting your manuscript before turning it in to an agent, publishing house editor, or even your freelance editor. And many newer authors don’t know it.

In Microsoft Word, you need to format the following:

1. Font Type: Times New Roman or Calibri
2. Font Size: 12 pt.
3. Font Color: Black
4. Margins: 1” all around (top, bottom, left, and right)
5. Line Spacing: Double
6. Indent: 0.5” First Line
7. Flush: Left (not Justified)

This is the basic for formatting a manuscript. You can use any program (i.e. Pages, Scrivner) you’d like to create your manuscript, but you will have to turn it in as a Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx). This is the industry-wide standard for submissions.

Punctuation, Spelling, and Grammar:

 Don’t rely on AI to catch all the issues in your manuscript. There are too many things for AI to miss. Have you ever looked at what your text editor on your phone tries to correct or errantly corrects? How about Microsoft Word’s red squiggly lines and blue underlines? They’re far from always being accurate.

Don’t rely on SpellCheck either. Don’t be lazy. Do the work yourself. Not sure how to spell something? Google it. The dictionary sites will have the correct spelling. Not sure if it’s capitalized? Google it. Is it hyphenated? Again, the dictionary sites found when Googling will likely have the answer.

• Make sure you close your quotation marks.
• Don’t overuse ellipses and em dashes (usually a comma will do just as well).
• Are you missing any periods or question marks at the end of sentences?
• There should be no more than two exclamation points in your entire manuscript, and that’s being generous.

Overuse of Words:

There are different types of words you can overuse. Let’s take a look at a few:

• Pet Words – These are words you like to use, and we writers tend to use them a lot. What are your pet words?
• Adverbs – These typically end in -ly. Normally, you will find them at the beginning of your sentences. But occasionally they slip in elsewhere and totally don’t show the reader what you’re really trying to say. It takes time and creativity to write far better sentences without including these pesky words.
• Repetitive Verbs – Do a search in your manuscript for the following words and note how many times you’ve used them:
• Smile, Grin
• Laugh
• Nod
• Sigh
• Began to
• Started to
• Saw
• Heard

It takes some effort, but you really do need to find other ways to describe joy and sadness, agreement, and whatever other emotion or physical response you tend to favor. A good resource for this is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

Also, never use began to or started to. If you began running, you ran. If you started to laugh, you laughed. Use the past tense of the verb instead.

• Adjectives – Don’t go all purple prose on your reader. Keep adjectives to a minimum and find different ones to describe the same thing throughout your manuscript.

There are many things you can look for within a manuscript to spring clean your writing. I could write a book, but this is a blog post, so I’ll keep it shorter.

If you’d like to learn more about improving your writing, my next tip for spring cleaning is this:

Attend an event created for writers.

Here are a few ideas for what to attend:

• A local writers/critique group
• An online workshop
• An online course
• A writers conference (BRMCWC is coming up!)

And finally, read books about writing.

Doing these things will help you spring clean your writing and prepare it for an editor’s expertise.

Read Part 1 Here

Read Part 2 Here

Alycia Morales is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines and several compilation books. Thanks to her mad editing skills, her clients have won multiple awards in several national contests. In addition, she’s the prior Conference Assistant for the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. Alycia is currently working on a nonfiction project while characters are running around in her mind waiting to be released into children’s books and novels. Surviving the Year of Firsts: A Mom’s Guide to Grieving Child Loss released on September 17, 2024.

When she isn’t busy writing, editing, and reading, Alycia enjoys spending time with her husband taking hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas or running off to the beach with friends. She loves coffee, sweet tea, crafting, and watching crime shows.

Alycia can be found at alyciawmorales.com. She hangs out on Facebook and Instagram.