The The NSW Writers' Centre

Deonie Fiford – on Polishing Your Manuscript

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Writing Queensland, the publication of the Queensland Writers’ Centre.

In today’s publishing environment, it’s becoming increasingly hard to get the attention of a publishing company or an agent. So, when you are ready to submit, it’s crucial that your manuscript is as polished as it possibly can be.

What does polishing a manuscript actually mean? Like polishing a table, you need to make several passes over the whole piece, working on specific areas and building up the layers of polish. It can be hard work, but the end result is certain to be a brighter, more impressive piece.

Polishing is about self-editing so it is helpful to get into the mindset of editing rather than writing. Editors look at your work objectively and think about how a reader responds to it. They look first at the overall structure of your work – how it fits together as a whole; then they examine key areas like character and style; and then they look at details like spelling and punctuation. The trick to self-editing and polishing your manuscript successfully is to try and think like an editor.

So the first and most important step in polishing is to actually not polish at all, but to try and get some distance from your manuscript. This will help you find your own objective editorial eye. When you have finished your draft try and leave it alone for as long as you can. Ideally, leave it alone for at least a few months. If you can manage this, when you take it out again and re-read it you will be looking at it with fresher eyes and far more objectivity.

Next, try and approach your work in a different frame of mind. If it helps, think of yourself as an editor who is reading someone else’s work. How do you react to it? Alternatively, imagine that when you’re writing you wear a writer’s hat and when you’re editing you wear an editor’s hat. You can’t wear them both at the same time. So when you’re looking over your work, you’re only wearing the editor’s hat. This will help free you from the demands of being the writer and allow you to see the work more as a reader would.

While you’re wearing the editor’s hat try not to allow yourself to start writing. An editor wouldn’t rewrite your work, so nor should you at this point. Many writers begin to read through their work and then see a problem early on, in chapter 3 for example, and start fixing it immediately. Then they become tangled up in chapter 3 and, before they know it, they’ve taken off the editor’s hat, put the writing hat back on and have lost the chance to get an objective sense of the work as a whole.

Try and read the manuscript through once – in its entirety – without stopping to fix anything, without even a pen in your hand. When you get to the end, jot down all the thoughts you had. This is how an editor reads a manuscript when they’re doing a structural edit – because it allows them to get an idea of the overall structure of the work without becoming distracted by the smaller details.

At this stage you should be looking at the overall arc of your story – does it have a satisfying beginning? Are there any plot gaps? Is anything confusing? Are there unnecessary parts (like a character or a sub-plot)? Also, think about the overall voice and point of view. When you write down your first impressions, remember to include positives. It’s very easy to be critical, but it’s important to focus on the things that you’ve done well. You can use these elements to then build on the areas that aren’t working as well.

This is the big picture polish – the first layer – that will lay the foundation for the rest of your polishing. It may require some large scale rewriting (to fix a problematic point of view, to try and create a stronger voice, to rework a sub-plot, to smooth out a plot problem) and it may be time to put on the writing hat again.

Once you have reworked the structural issues, you can move onto the next layer of polish. It’s time to get a little closer to the text. Examine your dialogue and your characterisation, look at whether you are telling the reader things rather than showing them, look at your use of adjectives and adverbs, your balance of descriptive and active writing. Don’t be afraid to cut words, scenes or characters. Be brave and your work will be stronger as a result.

When you have been through each of these layers, then it’s time to start looking at your work line by line and making sure it’s as professional as possible. Most people think this is what polishing means – fixing up typos and checking your grammar – but this is the last part of a long process.

When you have been through all of these steps, then you will have a much more impressive and professional piece of work. Polishing requires a lot of patience and hard work, but your manuscript will be much stronger as a result. Don’t forget that finishing a manuscript in the first place is a great achievement, so have confidence in your abilities and be proud of what you have already achieved.