Editing in 10 minutes (easy ways to improve your book)

How to edit your book in 10 minutes

Editing your book is a very extensive and time consuming task. It takes a lot of time to do and even more to learn, but where not here for that so lets cut the chase. 

You already have your story written down and optimally made sure the following points are checked of (or at least all of the ones you are interested in):

-Central conflict

-Engaging plot

-Interesting and unique characters

-Every scene has a purpose

-Good pacing

(I might make a book on those topics as well)

The most efficient way to edit I found is using ChatGPT. For those few not familiar with: ChatGPT is a language model AI capable of generating text. Essentially it will do all the work for you if you know what to do.

I am first going to explain how to let your text get edited in a good way by ChatGPT and then talk about its capabilities, limitations through an example and how to improve your text even more (for those interested).

The editing process:

Step 1: Type the following prompt into ChatGPT

You are a professional editor for a novelist. Your job is to understand the text you are given to its core meaning understand the emotion the writer tries to induce and correct him/her. You are very strict and pay a lot of attention to phrasing (and [Add as described in Step 2]). Also after you wrote an improvement you note what the author was trying to do, what you changed to improve the delivery of that intention and why. 

 Here are some notes about the following text: 

[Add your notes here as described in Step 3]

Here is the text you improve:

[Add your text here as described in Step 4]

Step 2: You do not have to add anything here. 

But it is given as an option to add any more aspects you want ChatGPT to look out for.

As an example: dialogue flow, show don't tell, strong verbs, easy language, formatting, decisive wording,... Whatever you can come up with.

(make sure you leave "phrasing" there no matter what) 

Step 3: This space is meant for adding context, the purpose of the scene and important character traits. 

It is very crucial that you add those very decisively. For this passage make sure you know exactly what is important in your scene and what you want to achieve with it.

Also important: view (*) on Step 4

Step 4: This is a simple matter of copy and pasting. 

The length can realistically go up to a few hundred words before it starts breaking down. As a rough rule of thumb: The more text you add at once the less precise ChatGPT will be. I recommend to go with about 200-300 words per message.

(*) If you write all of that in the same chat history ChatGPT will be able to remember previous messages and potentially use context you provided earlier for newer scenes. It can mess with the newer responses, but usually it is quite useful for it to understand a bigger part of the story. Depending on if you like or not: Either start a new chat or stay on the same chat.