🥑 search! (ripple effects 5)

Little changes are the hardest to spot.

I still wince at the time my protagonist discovered that her brother had been kidnapped—only for him to walk down the stairs with her at the beginning of the next scene.

(This is why the most detail-oriented of us still hire editors).

These little changes can include:

• Character and object descriptions (e.g., making a character blonde)

• Word/punctuation formatting (capitalization, italicization, ellipsis)

• Character presence in a scene

A thorough, efficient process is your key to keeping these edits consistent. Let’s use an example.

In the first draft of Marrow and Soul, my character Curt was blond. But when I made him Safran’s biological brother instead of adopted brother for the sake of the story, I had to change a lot of little details in the story.

My solution: run a series of searches and make manual changes.

• “blond”: changed to “brown-haired,” etc. when appropriate. Note that I’ll catch both “blond” and “blonde” with this search.

• “hair”: this helped me isolate any alternative words for “blond” that I may have used, e.g., “straw-haired".”

• “bangs,” etc.: Whenever I found an alternative word for hair, I searched for that term throughout the manuscript.

In short: find every iteration of the necessary change through specific, effective searches.

(Note that I didn’t search for “Curt.” I could have done so, but as that name shows up hundreds of times in the manuscript, my tired eyes could have missed a few. Every published author can attest.)

Manual changes are key. The find-and-replace feature feels easier, but it risks the very thing we’re trying to avoid: ripple effects.

I’d love to hear from you: how do you deal with ripple effects? I may share your responses in a future Bite.

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