Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Checklist
- Do not poke and modify your text before you have finish typing the whole story, or at least finished a
section. Otherwise, it's easy to get stuck and thus never become ready.
- Wait a few days before you go through what you have written. Then try to read it as if you've never
seen it before, in that way it may be easier to see the shortcomings.
1. Set-up, check that:
- You haven’t accidentally changed the set-up somwhere.
2. Spelling
- Remember that word processing program, such as "Word", do not select the words that appear in the
program's dictionary. Which means that the wrong word is spelled correctly.
- It is easy to make double space sometimes. You can easily correct that, if you use "Word", and with the
function "Replace" replace all double spaces with simple ones, i.e. "__" is replaced with "_".
3. The language, check that:
- It is a proper mix of long and short sentences. Remember that when it's exciting, it is often useful to
have more short sentences.
- Several sentences in sequence does not begin in the same way. If so, you should rearrange a bit.
- Not different tenses are accidentally mixed in one event.
- The words fit the situation.
- The words are not repeated too often. If so, consider synonyms that you can replace them with
sometimes. Check in particular that it is not too tight between the words he/she. If so, you can:
a. Replace a part of them with the word, as an example, for the body part that does something, such as
"the hand closed around the handle" instead of "he gripped the handle."
b. Replace some of them with his/her such as "Her eyes swept over the room" instead of "she looked
around the room."
c. Remove sentences.
d Remove the word he/she sometimes the sentences works anyway.
e. Replace some of the he/she with the person's name or nickname.
4. The story, check if:
- There are longer pieces of text that do not add anything. If so, remove them.
- It is possible to understand why things happen. Otherwise: supplement.
- It has the potential to give the reader what you want it to provide, for example, excitement, humor,
eroticism and romance.
5. Environments, check that:
- There isn’t a lot of unnecessary environmental descriptions. Major events should probably have a more
well described scene than unimportant ones. Unless it is a very special place that the unimportant event
takes place in.
- The environments are described in various ways.
- The descriptions match the intended observer (the telling eyes, brain and language). Otherwise modify.
6. Dialogue, check that:
- The reader will recognize themselves in how the different people talking. If an individual often use
slang terms in the beginning he should probably continue to do so (unless there is a specific point in that
he changes his way of speaking, which may be the case).
- All the people in the story are not using the same language.
- what the characters say fits with how they are described.
- The words fit the situation.
- It is possible to follow who says what. Sometimes you may need to add some "he said" or "she said" for
the reader to keep up. But one should certainly not have such clarifications after each comment.
- There is not too much unnecessary dialogue.
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