Revising and Polishing a Short Story

Revision is not rewriting until it feels better. It is a set of passes, each asking one question, so that you are never trying to fix everything at once. Pass one: the story. Read it through without a pen. Can you say what it is about in one sentence, and is that what is on the page? Pass two: the shape. Cut the first paragraph and the last. Most stories improve - the real opening is often the second paragraph, and the real ending is one beat earlier. Pass three: the pressure. In every scene, name what the character wants and what it costs them. A scene that cannot answer either question either loses its place or gains one. Pass four: the senses. Replace one abstract line with something a body can feel: a smell, a temperature, the sound of a room. Pass five: the sentences. Read aloud. Anywhere you stumble, the sentence is doing something the story does not need. Cut adverbs, split long sentences, and search the draft for the words you use when you are buying time - 'suddenly', 'almost', 'just'. Pass six: the proof. Names, dates, spellings. Read backwards, last sentence first, so that you see what is actually there rather than what you remember writing. Do not run all six passes in one sitting. Put the story away for a day between the big passes. You are not looking for perfection; you are looking for a story where nothing is left doing nothing. Try this Take one finished draft and run passes two, three and five, in that order. Then read it aloud and note where you wanted to skip. That is where the next pass begins. Questions to sit with Which sentence in your story is there because you liked it rather than because the story needed it? What could you cut that no reader would miss?