NovelTalk - Polish That Manuscript Until It Shines

Polish That Manuscript Until It Shines

by Helen Brenna

Congratulations! You’ve finished your book. Now, before you send your baby off to an editor, an agent, or a contest, stop, take a deep breath, and polish her until she shines. Why? Because polished work tells a reader you’re a professional. And there’s no room for extra baggage in series romance. So whether your story is a SuperRomance or a Blaze, you need to make sure your words count.

This is not the phase for wholesale revisions. If you’re ready to polish, you’ve already done your best on the basics like characterization, conflict, and story structure. This is the last thing you do before you mail your manuscript off, so don’t rush it. An editor would rather read your best possible work, even if that means it lands on her desk a little later than you’d hoped.

My steps for polishing have changed over the years as my writing as evolved. I encourage you to pay attention to your own weaknesses and come up with your own methods for eliminating them from your writing. In the meantime, here’s a good start:

1. Develop a list of words that are either unnecessary or that you tend to overuse and remove as many as possible. Some of my personal favorites are just, simply, even, that, clearly, besides, well, up, and down. These are unnecessary words that don’t materially change the meaning of the sentence. For example, replace the phrase, “He sat down” with “He sat.” I keep adding to my list because with every book it seems I become enamored with another word!

2. Develop a list of other words that can flag problems in sentence structure. I have a habit of using words like began, started, or tried/trying. “She started to walk toward the door” is cleaner and more succinct as, “She walked toward the door.”

Words like was or were alert me to the use of passive voice. “There was a dog sitting in her back yard” can be rewritten in an active voice as “A dog sat in her back yard.”

Words like saw or noticed alert me to another problem. “She saw him read the note.” We’re in her point of view, so there’s no reason to tell a reader that “she saw” something. “He read the note” gets the message across with fewer words and helps the reader stay seamlessly in your character’s head.

3. Look for redundancies. Speech classes teach students to “tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” This doesn’t work in fiction. Your pacing will suffer and you’ll lose readers. Sometimes narrative is needed to explain what a character is thinking or feeling, but sometimes well-written dialogue is enough.

For example: Her patience was running thin. "I don't want to wait,” she said. “ Can't you tell me about it now?"

The concept of patience running thin comes across to a reader in a much more efficient and interesting way through the dialogue. The words “I don’t want to wait” say it all.

4. Use adverbs sparingly. In the sentence, “Don’t go in there!” he said excitedly, the word excitedly is unnecessary. The dialogue and exclamation point are all you need.

Often, choosing a more appropriate action verb eliminates the need for an adverb. “He walked slowly across the room” might read better as “He strolled across the room.”

5. Mix it up, or streamline.

If every one of your sentences is short, or compound, or every paragraph starts with “He did this or that,” you’ll bore your readers. Mix it up. Remember, though, that overly long sentences can pull a reader out of the story by forcing her to dissect what’s happening. Here’s an example of a convoluted sentence I pulled out of my next SuperRomance coming in October 2008 before it went to my editor.

“After being certain she’d convinced the driver, with the promise of more money, to wait for her return, she jumped out of the cab and ran toward the rows of vendor carts.”

I rewrote it like this:

“After ~~being certain she’d convinced~~ promising the driver~~, with the promise of~~ more money~~, to wait for~~ on her return, she jumped out of the cab and ran toward the ~~rows of~~ vendor carts.”

A 32 word sentence drops to 21. It’s especially important to keep sentence structure tight in action scenes.

6. Read aloud. If you can’t figure out what’s wrong with a sentence or a paragraph, try reading it aloud. You’ll be surprised by what you hear. Stilted dialogue, duplication of words, verbose style. I’m certainly guilty of all three.

It’s a lot of work, but all that polishing will pay off and your writing will improve.

All that said, remember that no book is ever perfect. While you want your writing to be the best it can be, polishing too much can take away some of a story’s freshness, making it feel overworked. So be careful. And don’t use polishing as an excuse to keep your manuscript warm and safe and dry. Dress your baby up and send her out into the wild blue yonder. She might get a few bumps and bruises along the way, but it’s the only way she’ll ever get a cover!