Polish That Manuscript Until It Shines
Helen Brenna © 2008
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!
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