The Devil is in the Details: Tips to Polish Your Manuscript

You’ve defied the odds and completed your manuscript. It may have taken years of your life (or off your life), or maybe NANoWriMo turned you into a speed demon. So, what now? Now, it’s time to submit. But is your work really ready for publication? This is the question you MUST ask yourself to avoid squandering a query on an agent or publisher that can never be redone or undone, or self-publishing a book that is not the best version of itself and your talents.

But what does “ready for publication” mean? Where might you find a checklist for this amorphous concept. Sad to say, there is no such thing and all editors have different pet peeves. Still, there are various quirks in your, and every, manuscript that you can be remedy before pressing “send.” Most editors find certain linguistic, stylistic, and content habits, the sign of an author without a firm grasp on writing craft or evidence of one who hasn’t taken the time to labor over every last word until it shines.

This list of tips is in no way exhaustive, but it does cover a range of foibles. Keep in mind, the less work on minutiae you leave for an editor to “fix,” the more likely you are to get a request for a full manuscript, or even a contract for publication.

Show Don’t Tell

The basic admonition, “Show Don’t Tell,” merits repeating. Telling is by far the most prevalent problem in submissions. Show action and emotion (with body language, action tags, inner narration), don’t tell the reader what is happening or what the character is feeling in a vague/summary fashion.

Weak/Passive Writing

• Avoid adverbs (-ly words). Use stronger verbs instead. For example, “Pam spoke loudly” versus “Pam screamed,” or whatever verbs suits the emotion of the moment.
• Where possible, eliminate modifiers and replace with stronger description The following are common choices to boost descriptive power or give it subtlety, but, in reality, they only weaken or confuse the prose. Examples are:
  • apparently
  • seemingly
  • noticeably
  • supposedly
  • clearly
  • obviously
• Avoid the passive voice—actions being “done to” characters are not as engaging as characters acting.
• Eliminate stall phrases, such as “seemed to,” “tried to,” “began to,” “almost,” “nearly,” “practically,” “literally.” These are often signs of telling or serve as hacks to get around POV challenges and weaken the power of your prose. A character who “almost laughing” isn’t laughing, but may be “grinning,” “smiling,” “smirking.”

Dialogue Attribution/Tags; Dialogue

• Dialogue tags should be invisible and used only if required to clarify who is speaking.
• “Said” and “asked” are sufficient.
• Tags should not be used as a crutch to communicate emotion (another form of telling). “Come back later,” Sally growled, while, accurate serves up the emotion in a dialogue tag and not the dialogue itself. Show how frustrated Sally is through action, such as Sally slammed a fist on the table. “Come back later.” The constant use of modifying dialogue tags, “yelled,” moaned,” and myriad others can serve to distract, or, worse, annoy, the reader.
• Every character needs a distinct voice. If your characters all sound the same, the way to remedy is not to use dialogue tags. Work on characterization through dialogue content and action.
• Avoid chatty dialogue with no purpose. Dialogue must serve to characterize or advance the plot.
• Avoid on the nose and chatty dialogue. Dialogue is an opportunity to convey character and subtext, and to advance the story.

Eliminate Filter and Filler Words

Filter words are redundant and distance reader from character’s POV. Examples are:

• See/Saw
• Heard/Hear
• Felt/Feeling/Feel
• Watched/Watch
• Thought/Think
• Knew/Know
• Realized/Realize
• Considered
• Could seemingly
• Could tell/Can tell

Filler Words/Qualifiers such as the following weaken the impact of your prose.

• Just
• So
• Actually
• Literally
• Sentences staring with “But” “And” “Well” “So” “Or”

Miscellaneous:

• Repetition—By reading aloud, identify repeated words, expressions, uses of proper names or terms of endearment within sentences, paragraphs, and scenes.
• Search for “it” and “it was” and substitute more visual language.
• Avoid too many gerunds (-ing words).“Walking into the office, she dropped her purse.” Starting to go inside, she stopped dead in her tracks.”
• Avoid paragraphs of “this happened and then this happened and then…” This type of writing reads like a list and not a story.
• Avoid over doing the stage direction which often comes into the form of “up” and “down.” “Sat down,” “stood up.” Sat” or “stood” will suffice. Avoid over stage directing the physical actions of characters. Readers will fill in the gaps in their own minds.
• Prepositional phrases such as “to her,” “for him,” weaken the ends of sentences. “She gazed in horror at him” is much stronger without “at him”
• Avoid overused action verbs. They can become a writer’s “tic.” Find more descriptive verbs.
  • move/moved
  • push/pushed
  • reach/reached
  • look/looked
  • step/stepped
  • turn/turned
• Avoid all clichés. Clichés can be turns of phrase, such as the title of this blog—The Devil is in the Details. Clichés can also take the form of plot/action elements, such as the love triangle or the dastardly villain.

Tools such as a general Thesaurus and an Emotion Thesaurus are your friends. Don’t be afraid to use them, browse their pages when you are bored, and recommend them to fellow writers. Looking away from the page/screen and thinking works too for finding novel ways to express what’s in your head. Imagine you’re having a chat with a smart friend and you never know what smart words will pop into your consciousness.

Your manuscript is in the hopper. Congratulations! Now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of fine tuning every word to make your manuscript unique, the product of your talent, hard work, and attention to detail.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels