First Five Pages Manuscript Editing Workshop

Week 1: Presentation; Adjectives and Adverbs

Week 2: Sound and Comparison

Week 3: Style and Dialogue Part 1

Week 4: Commonplace and Informative Dialogue

Week 5: Melodramatic and Hard to Follow Dialogue

Week 6: Showing versus Telling; Viewpoint and Narration

Week 7: Characterisation and Hooks

Week 8: Subtlety and Tone

Week 9: Focus and Setting

Week 10: Pacing and Progression

Have at least the first five pages of your manuscript reading for the editing process. Ideally, you want to have completed the first or second draft of your manuscript so that you can use this course to continue editing your entire manuscript. If you don't have a full length manuscript, you can still benefit from this workshop by working on a short story.

I regret that I won't be able to provide one-on-one feedback and advice, but you are welcome to post questions and short examples in the guestbook at the end of this lens so that other readers and participants can benefit too.

Alternatively, you can look into my critique service, if you're needing comprehensive advice on your manuscript.

Here is your first assignment this week:

1. Prepare the manuscript you'll be working on by copying and pasting the first five pages into a new document and saving it under a different filename. You might want to create a folder just for this workshop so that you can play with several versions of your pages.

2. Read through the Introductionand Chapter 1: Presentation of The First Five Pages.

3. Read through the articles Formatting your submission to agents and publishers and Calculating the typesetting wordcount of your manuscript.

4. Make notes on the approach you're thinking of taking with your manuscript once it is ready: will you send it out to agents or publishers (if so, who? why?)? Do you prefer to try smaller independent presses? Or will you self-publish? These are just initial thoughts that may change as you work through your manuscript and also as you begin to research your publishing options.

5. Check the formatting of your manuscript. Have you used the standard formatting for the industry? (Before you change your formatting, save your document under a new filename just in case your formatting changes cause strange problems and you need to try again.)

6. Starting with your five pages, check for the correct use of question marks and parentheses, and hunt for those clichés. If you have time, keep going on the rest of your manuscript.

7. In preparation for one of the upcoming chapters, try to set aside some time each day to read some poetry. Here are some suggestions that you can read online:

Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold
The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe
Inaugural Poem - Maya Angelou
The Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - Robert Browning
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1. Read through Chapter 2: Adjectives and Adverbs of The First Five Pages.

2. Read through the article Adjectives and Adverbs - Editing Skills

3. As per the end of chapter exercises, remove the modifiers from your first page and read the page without them.

4. Check through the list of modifiers that were removed and decide which can be removed completely, or look for stronger replacements.

5. List the nouns and verbs in your first page and try to find stronger, or more interesting, replacements that limit the need for modifiers.

6. Try to rewrite your first page without using any modifiers. Can you? How does this challenge improve your writing muscles?

7. Make some notes on what you've learnt from this exercise, what works for you and what doesn't.

8. Edit the modifiers in your other four pages, and test your nouns and verbs for strength and quality. Does your editing get any easier and quicker as you go through the pages?

9. Keep reading that poetry. Here are some more suggestions:

spring is like a perhaps hand - e e cummings
The Jumblies - Edward Lear
Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Eagle (a fragment) - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For a Picture - Algernon Charles Swinburne

The First Five Pages is copyright © Noah Lukeman. Summaries of exercises are provided for review purposes.

All articles provided as resources are copyright © Elsa Neal.