Polishing the Final Draft: a process

Day 4,250,486,783 of work on this novel.

I did it, I took the scariest step to date, the one I’ve been dreading and putting off for weeks, if not months. I submitted the novel to five literary agents¹.

Does that mean the novel is done?

Well, no. It’s in good shape, but it needs a copyedit and a few scenes need to be tweaked.

The advice, in literary circles, is to never, EVER query an agent before you are 100% done, and I understand why. What if they actually got back to you, so mesmerized by your sample pages that they’re eager to read the whole thing? What if they got back to you quickly??! What if you had to send them subpar work or admit you need a few weeks or months to finish polishing, by which point their interest would certainly wane?

Fair points, all. But the five agents I submitted to yesterday represent some of my favourite contemporary authors. They’re such pie-in-the-sky long shots that I doubt they’ll ever get back to me, let alone quickly. I submitted my very best, most polished pages, but I’m not delulu. I know how slim my chances are.

Still, the “what if” has already lit a fire under me to finish the revisions that have been strangling me, albatross-like, for months.

Endless revisions aren’t fun. But I thought it might be fun to describe my final draft approach, which is so different from the more substantive editing I was doing in drafts two through four.

A deep dive into my polish process.

I work on the manuscript three chapters at a time — 20-25 pages, a very manageable length, going through the steps below, one section at a time.

First, major revisions.

I read through the pages, make notes of any major edits or rewrites that need to be tackled, and work on those first. Ideally, by this stage, there are very few!

Sometimes, I change the order of certain paragraphs and reread them to assess whether I’ve improved or ruined the flow, but mostly, I am confirming that the chapters hold together well. If they do, and only need a polish, then I go in for the surgical, sentence-by-sentence work.

Second, I do a search-and-replace for words I overuse.

Every writer has pet words. As a reader, I’m very sensitive to them. As a writer, I’m utterly blind to my own, but have learned to recognize a few, because readers have pointed them out to me. A former editor marked 30 instances of “grab” in a ten page excerpt, used instead of “take” or “pick up.” I was slightly mortified, but grateful. When Colin read the second draft, he pointed out “roil.”

I now know sketch, stretch, and etch are all words I love to (over)use, as are slap and smack (like, “she smacked the counter for emphasis,” not like “he smacked her bodacious ass”). I search for the word “nod,” too. My characters are eternally nodding.

I then search for the words “only” and “just,” and for the suffix “ly” in order to catch various adverbs I know I’m relying on to do too much heavy lifting. I search for adjectives too, because I tend to overwrite, and this is a good way to strip the fluff away. I search for the word “that,” and on average, cut at least half of all instances.

Last, I search for phrases like “she saw” or “he heard” and replace every “she saw a bird fly by” with “a bird flew by” and every “he heard an engine roar” with “an engine roared,” which invariably improves those sentences.

This step is the reason why I split the manuscript into 20-ish-page chunks. Searching a short excerpt for a parade of roiling smacks is much less mind-numbing than searching all 300 pages at once.

Third, I tackle the verbs.

Similar to step one, but different in the sense that I’m considering all verbs, sentence by sentence, rather than using a search function to pluck out specific words.

If the verbs feel mundane and blah, I try to come up with surprising alternatives. This kind of hunt and peck editing tends to make my eyes glaze over after a while, which is also why it helps to only do it in 20-page increments.

Fourth, I do a visual (which is to say, arbitrary yet shockingly effective) tightening pass.

I once took a short story class, in which we were assigned an exercise that forever changed the way I think about editing. We were told to write a short story, in as many words as we felt were necessary to tell it well. Then, when we were completely satisfied with our brilliant stories, we were told to cut the word count by 50% — but here’s the catch! — without losing anything.

It’s the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done, assessing every sentence and ruthlessly trimming it down to the quick. My 50%-shorter story was a lot better than the longer original, and I never looked back.

These days I take a slightly less drastic approach. I don’t need to cut my novel in half, but I do think I can lose about 7,000 - 10,000 words (out of the current 92,000) this way.

I start by looking at each paragraph — literally, visually. If the final line of the paragraph has only a few words in it (less than half the length of a full line, say), I find ways to shorten the paragraph with the goal of losing that final line.

This is totally arbitrary, and it works very well. I’ve never encountered a paragraph that couldn’t be improved with this approach, which I can’t take credit for. It came from Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done, the most practical and useful book I’ve ever read, when it comes to the final draft process.

Fifth, I reread the whole section out loud.

This takes a long time and is hard to do in a cafe (although I have absolutely whispered pages to myself in public), but it’s the best way to spot clunky dialogue, overwrought descriptions, and awkward sentence structure. I fix as I go.

Then I skim through it again and repeat step four for any paragraphs that have a new little overhang.

Finally, I move on to the next three-chapter chunk.

I suspect this all sounds tedious, especially to anyone who hasn’t tried to wrestle a 300-page slippery kraken into submission, but I (kind of) enjoy it. At least, I’m enjoying it right now, on page 50. Talk to me when I get to page 312.

1. More on the long, rejection-laden “finding an agent” phase of the process in another post.