Part vi. Polishing

                                    

                                          
When you polish and fine-tune your story, you deal with the following issues: wordiness; effective wording; effective sentence patterns; grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and accuracy of dates and other real-world things, if you are writing realistic fiction.
                          
I also want to point out that as you fine-tune, changes you make can affect style, and if they do very much, you're heading back to revision.
                          
Wordiness
                          
Redundancy
                          
Some of this I touched upon in the previous part, but this time I want you to think about why you would want redundancy.
                          
• Is the redundancy used for emphasis?
• Is the redundancy used for comparison?
• Does the redundancy now and then seem fitting to your character?
• Can you use redundancies for wit, for humor?
• Would the use of redundancies suggest something about your character's redundant thinking?
                          
If these are true, redundancies might actually work well in character thought as well as in scenes.
                          
Before you prune redundancies, decide on the language needed to create your character, to flesh this character out in all of his complexities. If redundancies—or at least some redundancies—are useful, keep them. Otherwise, prune.
                          
Effective Word Choice
                          
The author of "Write and Revise for Publication," Jack Smith, offers great advice:
                          
"First, I wouldn't depend on a thesaurus. Too often writers will plug in a synonym that just doesn't work well in context. Or, the word just isn't used the way they want to use it. I once read a good distinction: You eradicate crime, not criminals. The word eradicate isn't used, normally, to speak of people—and if it were, it would sound pretty heartless. My recommendation: Go ahead and use a thesaurus, but depend more on a dictionary. Depend even more on words in action—watching how professional authors use the language."
                          
Diction
                          
Depend ultimately on how the word functions in the sentence, whether in prose, dialogue, or scene. This is cleanup work. You've developed a style for your manuscript by now, but you're working on honing it. The right word depends on being attentive to different issues—four of which are:
                          
1. Precision in Language
                          
This has to do with those so-called words of power that help us to avoid vagueness. They narrow the meaning; they make fine distinctions. For instance, instead of "good," meaning "skilled," you might choose "adept"—if your character or narrator is educated.
                          
2. Degree of Formality/Informality
                          
This is related to the issue of precision. Formal word choices like inexorably tend to be more precise. Being "adept" at a particular skill is much more precise than being "good" at it. The question is, how formal or informal should your story be?
                          
Go over your manuscript to make sure you haven't chosen words that seem out of sync with your character or style. If you have, choose the right word now—or make a note and come back to it later.
                          
Granted, you can have a blend of the formal and the informal. Think context. Perhaps you've written in an informal style, but a formal word somehow adds an air of sophistication that seems appropriate to the character's present goals or thinking. Or perhaps you've written in a formal style, and you want to show the character's present laid-back feeling.
                          
Choice of formal or informal always related to the character or to the narrator—and possibly to circumstance. For instance, one character might order a "pilsner," another a "brewski."