Clear pebbles off the path.
Read your draft, and then read it again.
The man who introduced me to the craft of writing, Tracy Dahlby, once told me that when you’re at the final stage of a story, you ought to read through and make sure every sentence flows into one another. It’s like you’re walking along a smooth trail, and you step on a pebble. The pebble won’t ruin your experience, but if you can kick that pebble aside, you might as well.
When I am 95 percent done with a story, I rotate through a cycle. I read the draft out loud. I have a friend read it. I read it again in a new format. I have some software read it. And then, for good measure, I read it one, or two, or three more times.
Speaking your draft out loud is common advice for a good reason. It helps you locate clunky phrasing and missed words and is a great measure to see if you’re writing like you talk.
This read-through is where a bulk of that last 5 percent comes in. It might surprise new writers, but many significant cuts come at the end of the writing process. When you are in this final stretch, you will have a sense of what sections of your essay have struggled to find their place in the piece. In the “Cut big, then small” chapter of his book Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark talks about how brevity comes from selection, not compression. He says, “If your goal is to achieve precision and concision, begin by pruning the big limbs. You can shake out the dead leaves later.”
Remember, you can store away these cut sections in an overflow document for another day.
Don’t bias fresh eyes.
When I self-publish, I will have a friend or two read my nearly complete draft. Whenever I go for outside feedback, I try to limit the number of concerns I vocalize beforehand. If I don’t have to, I don’t want to bias someone with all of my doubts and insecurities about my work. If you tell someone there’s a problem in your story, they will likely find it even if it’s not there.
Now I don’t want to waste people’s time. When I am fully confident that an issue exists and want them to read for specific solutions, then, by all means, I’ll let them know. But when my question is IF there is a problem, then I hold off mentioning any concern.
“If you tell someone there’s a problem in your story, they will likely find it even if it’s not there.”
At the end of the discussion, I will ask my friend if any sections confused them. This is perhaps the greatest tool we have against minor jumps in logic. When we spend a long time with a story, we can easily fill in the gaps and forget what is not common knowledge. A new reader can spot the deficiencies. If we can find someone unfamiliar with the subject matter of our story, then that is even better.
Now, let’s run it back. Again. And again. And…
Now, and only now, we get into the repetitive part of this process. After I make big cuts and little tweaks to smooth the transitions, I will hop over to a fresh document to see my story in a new light. I personally copy & paste my story over into Grammarly, which serves the dual purpose of an additional spell check.* You can alternatively change the font, font color, or print out your story, as long as you switch up the look of things. After that, I copy my story into any online text-to-voice software. I use NaturalReader and then hit the speaker and follow along as the sweet staccato tones keep me on pace. The same principles of reading out loud the draft apply here. I’m finding those last clunky words and phrases that aren’t serving the story.
There are many resources out there about the type of words that have high potential to be cut. Here’s a shortlist to get you started. All of these words rarely add anything to a given sentence: Very, Rather, Really, Quite, In fact, Just, So, Pretty, Surely, That said, Actually. And to refer back to Roy Peter Clark, look out for adverbs that intensify rather than modify: certainly, entirely, extremely, completely, exactly.
Some of this may seem excessive, but I’ve never regretted doing my due diligence. And I’m still often surprised by how many little mistakes make it all the way through to the last rounds of these read-throughs. The final read-through comes when the story is in its last destination. Whether that is as an exported PDF you’re sending to an editor, or in the website publishing client—check that all your emphasis formatting like bold, italics, and underlining have made it through the copying process and that your last-minute fixes didn’t create new problems.
Constantly rereading our work is probably one of the least sexy parts of the process. Not many cute ways to dress it up, but it’s like wearing a seat belt. You should do it.
Jade Fabello
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Thanks to Kelly of My Brilliant Friend and Ashen of Bed Head for feedback on this story.
*Note I do pay for and utilize the paid version of Grammarly, which is obviously not accessible to everyone. I plan to cover the merits of the software in a future letter.
Loved it! Cheers from Rio de Janeiro 🌷