I will look at producing a better manuscript mainly in terms of writing a better manuscript. I'll also say a bit about why you really shouldn't edit your own work. But the reality is that sometimes you will. So I'll finish by running through a checklist of editorial-type things to look out for if you do.

I'll start with a couple of assumptions about why we write books:

• We want them to be widely read, and enjoyed by most readers
• We want to work in this town again – writing history

What do we need to do to achieve these goals?

• tell a story
• that is more or less true
• in a coherent and lively way
• acceptable to both your readers and the client; and is
• delivered on time, more or less to the agreed word length

This all sounds banal when it's spelled out, but I won't apologise for that. I've seen too many texts whose authors don't seem to have grasped these elementary criteria. How can you avoid being one of them? First of all:

• Be as clear as you can about who your readers are
• Have an argument / master narrative / connecting thread

Readers

If you're writing the history of an institution – a company, a school, a sports club, a government agency – your core readership will obviously be present and past members of that institution, and their families. If it's a local history, it'll be the locals. What will they expect? They'd like a lively read with lots of photos; they'd love to find their own names in it – that's one reason the book should almost certainly have an index. But your credibility with these core readers depends on the bits of the story they know something about – or think they know something about, or at least have strong opinions about. So you're going to have to immerse yourself in the topic deeply enough to get an insider's perspective on it – but also stay detached enough from it to recognise an institutional myth when you're told one. This is quite a tricky balancing act.

Story

You probably have an obvious starting date – a tradesman hangs up his shingle, a few young men hack an inflated pig's bladder across a paddock, the community's eponymous ancestor rows her piano through the surf (but don't forget the people already on the beach – they're probably the ones doing the actual rowing and heavy lifting). And you have an end date, working backwards from the anniversary function at which the book must be available.

You need to tell a story that joins these two bookends in a satisfying way. Remember that lively narrative is the lifeblood of history.Do not imagine that the facts – let alone the documents – speak for themselves. They don't. In one sense they are mute – it's you who must give them voice, even make them sing a little. In another sense, the amount of potentially relevant material is effectively infinite, and there's a cacophony of competing voices. You get to decide who the soloists are. You can do that once you've chosen your organising theme, your master narrative – the thread that will give the book coherence, and make your story emotionally satisfying.

Is the history of a plumbing firm so enthralling in and of itself that you can simply lay it out year by year, decade by decade, like so many lengths of plastic piping? Probably not – it's up to you to guide your readers through the S-bends of history.

Your argument / point of view / organising theme will probably – whether you are aware of this or not – be taken from literature. There are only a few basic plots. There are Whiggish, Reggie Perrin-ish tales of unbridled success – the rise and rise of Company X. More often there are ups and downs before some kind of redemption. Yours may even be a story of ostensible failure – the company goes bust, the Forest Service goes out of existence, the school closes. All biographies, of course, end with death, often after a season of decline. That's one excuse for writing autobiography, I suppose – you can end the story in your vigorous prime.

Try to work out which of these fictional tropes your book follows. That will help you structure it. A firm may have been innovative and flourishing in the nineteenth century, then a stagnant beneficiary of import licensing for much of the twentieth, before being re-energised post-1984. There's your structure: a three-act drama with a happy ending – what more could a client ask for? And you know at once that this book will have three sections.

Your structure follows from the kind of story you decide to tell. It's likely to be essentially chronological – your client may get twitchy if it isn't – but you can emphasise important themes in particular chapters.

Set your history in its contexts:

• international
• social
• local

How was the sport changing? The world? The neighbourhood? Address underlying issues such as technological change. Link the firm's fortunes to developments in the industry – did it really build a better mousetrap – the firm's core institutional myth – or was this actually a boom time for all pest exterminators? Why? And was there a public health crisis?

Try not to fragment discussion of important issues that don't fit into your broader narrative – use panels or extended captions. I'm thinking of things like the changing nature of work; the workplace culture; out-of-work connections such as company sports teams and office picnics. Did staff tend to marry each other? What was the contribution of significant individuals (who are not necessarily the managers)?

Writing

Variety is the spice of literary life, so:

• Mix it up: vary the length of chapters use sections and break-out panels; vary the length of sentence; keep it active
• Quote sparingly: to evoke past time and place when someone has already said it better, from letters, interviews – not other books. Don't quote others just because you can. Never quote big chunks of other people's prose – if you can't express it better yourself, why exactly are you writing this book?
• Use vignettes to make larger issues tangible – be a microhistorian
• Focus on the concrete – sights, sounds, smells, bodily sensations
• Start chapters with striking examples that lead in to the theme
• Deal with controversial issues carefully – but do deal with them
• Understand the client's point of view – but don't be captured by it. They've hired you to write their history because they want an independent view – an outsider's perspective. If they didn't want that, someone from public relations would be doing it. They're paying your salary but they don't own your soul, or your opinions.

Every firm has made mistakes; every agency has the odd skeleton in the closet. So:

• Show the client drafts to head off potential problems;
• Show drafts to others who can provide useful feedback; and
• Pay attention to detail

At this point I'll climb briefly onto a pet hobby-horse and berate you all for sloppiness. Participants in Australia's History Wars seem to agree that up to 10% of direct quotations – they usually mean other people's direct quotations – contain errors. In my experience the figure is more like 20%. Often the errors are trivial, of course, but sometimes they're not – and this matters! If you're getting quotes wrong, you're probably also on occasion misunderstanding what you're reading, or what people are telling you. And when you're writing for insiders, some of them are going to notice.

Another of my pet gripes is about how bad many historians are at handling data. And I don't mean relatively sophisticated stuff like correlations, but simple addition, percentages, converting measurements from imperial to metric. It's one of life's mysteries that so many historians who espouse the creed of objectivity don't record their basic data accurately, or do but then misinterpret it. If historians designed cars, we'd walk everywhere.

So my plea is: please, check your quotes and check your data.

Start writing anywhere – the main thing is to start! 1000 words a day works for me. Don't worry if its gibberish to begin with. Do worry if it's still gibberish after a month or two.

• Write, rewrite, rewrite again. Remember that you're a creative writer, and be self-conscious about what you're doing.
• Write slightly over the agreed word-length. Editing usually makes texts shorter – by say 10%.
• Allow enough time for editing. I can do 5000 words a day, with some checking as I go – if the draft is reasonably good to begin with.

The Editing Process

My key message is: You need a professional editor. Most people think that anyone can be an editor. Most editors, on the other hand, think that there aren't very many good editors around. Every editor knows people with no literary skills who are busy writing books. And if they eventually have enough sense to give up writing, they're quite likely to start looking for editing work.

Editing has been defined (by an editor) as 'a mysterious and arcane process practised by an almost anonymous society of sorcerer-initiates; and also as a con job'. There's something in both of these descriptions. But I'll say it again: Don't even think about editing your own work. I've edited my own stuff, and for the same economic reasons you want to. Good editors start at $40 an hour. So do bad editors – so ask around and look at books your prospective editor has edited before you sign them up. I can see all too clearly what a good editor would have done to my glittering prose. But I'm not a decent editor of my own work, and you aren't likely to be either.

Why not? Basically, authors are from Mars, editors are from Venus. Writing and editing involve different sets of skills, perhaps located in different parts of the brain. Writing is mostly about big egotistical masculine doing words – conceiving, structuring, amassing, building, organising. When writing goes seriously wrong, editing has to be about those things too. But mostly it uses more delicate, refined motor skills – shaping, polishing, checking, making consistent, dotting the i's and crossing the t's. ‘An editor must have the mind of a scholar and the soul of a clerk'. Editors need tolerance, tact, and the ability to hide their egos under a bushel.

Even if you are one of those rare androgynous people who combines all these qualities, you still won't be a good editor of your own work. Why not? Because you've invested too much of yourself in the research and the writing – it's just too hard to let go of stuff, to accept that something doesn't work or simply isn't important. You are not able to see how your words will appear to others. The editor can. She stands in for your future readers by being a tough critic now. She can see where you've been repetitious, long-winded, ambiguous, omitted a step in your argument, failed to explain a point.

Editing is largely a matter of common sense in deciding what to do and thoroughness in doing it. A broad general knowledge doesn't go amiss either. As with research and writing, there's never enough time to do it, so editors must prioritise.

A good editor is a rare creature: someone who cares enough about detail to spend a long time checking small points of consistency – but has the judgement not to waste time or antagonise the author by making unnecessary changes. Altering meanings inadvertently or messing with a distinctive authorial ‘voice' are particularly likely to annoy writers.

1. Substantive editing: content, scope, length, level, organisation. Are there any legal issues (libel, plagiarism)?

2. Detailed editing:Is the meaning clear? Any gaps / contradictions? expression – choice of words, logic of arguments, comprehensibility, punctuation, abbreviations, internal consistency (captions vs data vs text), quotations – are they accurate?, copyright & picture permissions

3. Checking for consistency (cf. house or author's style): spelling – NZ English?, quotations numbers – twenty/20, footnotes, bibliography – content, organisation numbering of: illustrations, tables, endnotes

4. Presentation: Is the material complete? Is the hierarchy of subheadings consistent?, typographic distinctions (e.g. long quotes), placement of illustrations and tables

5. Index: Does it meet length constraints? Concept, coverage, sub-entries, cross-references – See and See also, significance test – too many single-page entries? Check: alphabetical order, page numbers

6. Proofreading: read for sense, read against copy, consistency, attention to detail, mark up clearly

Useful Resources for Writers and Editors

Fowler's Modern English Usage , numerous versions of the 3rd edition [idiosyncratic, often infuriating, never forgets ‘that pestilent fellow the critical reader' who is ‘not satisfied with catching the general drift and obvious intention of a sentence', but insists that ‘the words used must … actually yield on scrutiny the desired sense']

The Oxford Guide to the English Language , Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York, 1985 [‘deals authoritatively with lexical and grammatical matters']

William Strunk Jr & E.B. White, The Elements of Style , 4th edition, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2000 [insists on ‘making every word count' – old but good]

The Collins Paperback Thesaurus in A–Z Form , 2nd edition, Collins, Glasgow, 1990 [much easier to use than Roget – Oxford also publish a thesaurus]

Judith Butcher, Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers, 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992 [comprehensive – ‘there are more things in an editor's world than you ever dreamed of']

Write Edit Print: Style Manual for Aotearoa New Zealand , AGPS Press / Lincoln University Press, Canberra, 1997 [good for those intrinsically Australasian questions]

Elsie Myers Stanton, Author and Editor at Work: Making a Better Book, University of Toronto Press, 1982 [common-sense, polite, down-to-earth advice for authors and editors]

Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath (eds), Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration , Monash University, Victoria, 2000 [Australian historians reflect on finding your ‘voice' – and saying something interesting]