I read a lot of first drafts, usually with Piper, my editor-in-chief, supervising from my lap. Lately more and more of them sound as if the same person wrote them, and that person doesn't exist. The sentences are clean, the paragraphs are tidy, and somewhere along the way the author has quietly slipped out of the room.
Sometimes an AI tool did the writing. Just as often, it's a smart, accomplished person trying very hard to sound like a Writer with a capital W. Readers feel it either way, usually long before they could tell you why, and they stop trusting the book one page at a time.
That matters more for your book than for almost anything else you'll ever write. A prospective client reading it is deciding whether to hire you. A grandchild reading it is meeting you. If the pages sound like a press release, both of them will notice.
These are the four habits I mark first when a manuscript lands on my desk.
Words you'd never say to a friend
Journey, landscape, testament, delve, leverage, navigate, pivotal, transformative. Any one of them is perfectly fine on its own. When half a dozen turn up on the same page, though, the reader can tell that nobody in particular wrote it. I swap each one for the word the author would use if they were telling me about it over coffee. "My career" beats "my professional journey" nearly every time.
The second habit is arguing with a claim nobody made. "This isn't just a book. It's a movement." "It's not about money; it's about freedom." Sentences like these invent an argument just so they can win it. Say the second half on its own. "I wanted freedom" is the stronger sentence.
The third is a story with no scene in it. "After months of persistent networking" gives the reader the summary of a story and skips the story itself. A real story happens somewhere, at a particular time, with another person in the room. So I ask the author what actually happened and who said what, and that's what goes on the page.
The fourth is the lesson arriving before the story, which I touched on in last week's essay about where the tension sits. Plenty of drafts open with the moral: "Securing my first major client taught me the power of relationships." Now the reader has nothing left to find out. (A reader made this exact point in the comments last week, and they were absolutely right.) Tell the story first, and let the reader arrive at the lesson alongside you.
What a voice edit looks like
Here's an example I use in The Manuscript Map. The facts are made up, but the method is exactly what I do.
A raw transcript of an author talking:
So, um, the first year we had the restaurant, I mean, we did not know anything, right? And my partner, Dave, he would say, he always said, you can fix a bad meal but you cannot fix an empty room. And I did not get it at the time. I thought he was just being, you know, Dave. But then that winter we had like three weeks where nobody came in, like nobody, and that is when I got it.
What a machine might write from it:
The early days of restaurant ownership were a crucible of learning. My business partner's wisdom, that an empty dining room is the ultimate challenge, proved prophetic during a particularly difficult winter, underscoring the vital importance of customer acquisition.
The same passage, edited in the author's voice:
The first year we owned the restaurant, we did not know anything. My partner, Dave, had a saying: "You can fix a bad meal, but you cannot fix an empty room." I thought he was just being Dave. Then came that first winter, and three weeks in January when almost no one walked through the door. That is when I understood him.
I kept Dave's line word for word, along with the author's own phrase, "just being Dave." I cut the filler and added one real month. The machine version went in the opposite direction: it traded a real person's words for abstractions and explained the lesson before the reader had a chance to feel it. There isn't a single sentence in it that could only have come from this author.
If you want this kind of edit on your own pages, The Editor's Pen is my full edit of one of your chapters, and The Manuscript Map comes with it.
A small thing to try tonight
Search your draft for the eight words from the first habit. If you find more than a handful, start your edit there.
"I doubted anyone could write the way I speak. After 15 interviews, Nikki delivered chapters that read exactly like me. When my wife read the draft, she teared up."
Founder, leadership book
And if you come across a sentence that makes you wince, you're welcome to reply with it. I'll fix a few of them, anonymously, in a Note this week.
From my desk to yours,
Nikki
P.S. The whole voice edit I run on every chapter, all six passes in the order I do them, goes to paid subscribers later this week. And next Tuesday, I'm writing about the one sentence every stalled book I've read was missing.
Oh yes!