Question A Checklist When Writing and Editing

Phoenix Spiritus and a few others were talking about editing stories for making them 'official' unofficial fanfic, when Phoenix mentioned how helpful Kristin had been. Phoenix then posted this nice little questionnaire, that was taken from the type of things Kristin pointed out. I like it a lot and think it's helpful not only for editors, betareaders and proofreaders, but writers who aren't so sure if they're going in the right direction.

Story as a whole

Is it a good story?
Is it an interesting story?
Is the style of writing engaging?
Is it readable? Have we made it as easy as possible for people to engage with the story?
Is this a story individual enough and of high enough quality to rate special attention and promotion to published status?


Characters

Are they well developed and written?
Are they understandable?
Are they relatable?
Are they interesting and engaging?
Are they telling us something new?


Writing

Is the style readable?
Are there parts of the writers style that need to be reigned in, "quirks" that can cause annoyances when reading?
Is the story balanced?
Are there parts of the story that don't need to be there? Things missing that need to be added?
Are parts of the story poorly implemented? Not getting the message across? Taking too long to present minor details? Not enough time spent building up properly to sell a climax? A climax that is too small for the build-up?
Are we leaving the readers with a message? Did the story actually communicate to the reader what it was intended to communicate?

Another thing to check if you are posting it only is to make sure that it is readable where you are posting it and if it isn't reformat it. Nothing makes me more frustrated than looking at what should be a good engaging story and have it be so poorly formatted that I can't read it.

True, I had that problem the first time I put up Fate Sucks.

Jarjaross wrote: Another thing to check if you are posting it only is to make sure that it is readable where you are posting it and if it isn't reformat it. Nothing makes me more frustrated than looking at what should be a good engaging story and have it be so poorly formatted that I can't read it.

The "enter" key is your friend. It is used to create paragraphs, and should be used twice to separate paragraphs making them easier to read.

Depending on the program you write it in, when it's transferred over it causes problems.
What looks like a normal paragraph space while I'm writing suddenly becomes a huge space when I put it on here. Just something to keep an eye on.

An easy way to make it easy to transfer from word processing programs to the site is to set your line spacing in your word processor to use double lines between paragraphs, that way you get the nice 'double line' in your word processor, and when you copy paste into the site only a single line.

Domoviye wrote: True, I had that problem the first time I put up Fate Sucks.

Fate Sucks was not that bad. I once spent a half hour trying to get through a fanfic toon with No line breaks. It wasn't to badly written either, from what little I could tell.

Thank you Kristin for explaining how the text editor works, but I have a question. How would you deal with the problem of someone posting from a saved document on a computer of mobile device. Assuming they've already written the story to this document and likely have the double line breaks between paragraphs as just a standard thing.

Once copied in its converted to HTML and we can use normal HTML clean-up methods to remove the excess code easily enough.

I had trouble with the HTML. So I typically spend about 10 minutes going through and removing lines with backspace, putting in page breaks with a copy and past of the appropriate symbol I've gotten froma published story, and things like that. It's slower but doesn't take too much time and for HTML newbies and idiots it's easier.

If you have a plain text editor that does find and replace, it relatively easy to use it to find and replace the excess HTML code in a story after it is copy pasted into a WYSIWYG editor for this site.

In particular, go for one which supports regular expressions. And then take the time to learn to use them, because Regexps are stupidly powerful for this sort of thing. (I use NoteTab, which I bought years ago, but I hear very good things about Notepad++, which is free)