You’ve got your novel finished and as you begin to read through you notice an inconsistency. If you’re a compulsive editor like me, this will happen no matter how hard you try to be consistent. It may be something as irritating as the spelling of a word flicking from American to English.
That’s any easy one to deal with. Search for the word using the search and replace facility and correct it at the push of a button.
Here’s another. You may have added a new character and you’re not sure if they’ve acted consistently, or they may have had some dark thoughts in the wrong place (who doesn’t?). As you do your read through, highlight his/her paragraphs in red throughout the manuscript. At the end, you can copy and paste all the red comments into a new document and read them chronologically. You will soon find if his/her behaviour goes out of sequence. This method will also allow you to expand on the character if you want to.
The seasons? Yes, these can be bothersome because you might forget whether it was winter or spring three chapters ago. Again, as you read through, highlight the weather reports, maybe in green.
So now you have your new character highlighted in red and your weather reports in green. Blue comes in handy too in case you hit another crisis.
I sorted out a few inconsistencies from my most recent novel in this way and it also helped strengthen my storyline.
Happy editing.