Five Strategies for Polishing Prose

Refining Your Story So Its Inner Brilliance Shines Through

Writing well is difficult, but revising well is a challenge of its own. It requires the daunting acrobatics of creating and destroying at the same time.

The irony is, to birth a story, you have to let your voice flow freely without restraint. But to revise well, you have to hold yourself back and call your baby ugly.

This can be painful. Writers are sensitive by nature and finely attuned to the nuances of human emotion. So to survive this vulnerable act of writing, we must bolster ourselves with self-assurance, believing every word we pen is a revelation.

At the same time, we must also be our own harshest critics, and survive the self-inflicted blows to our egos so we can live to write another day.

If, like me, you struggle to wear your editor’s hat, let this list be your guide. Here are five strategies you can use to look at your work from a new angle, to better find the lumps and bumps that need to be resculpted and reveal the true form within.

1. If something doesn’t fit, stop trying to force it in

Yes, the old analogy of square-peg-round-hole strikes again! Good writing and storytelling are never meant to feel forced.

Often, we are inspired by a moment, scene, or concept that we want to write about, so naturally, we try to incorporate it into our present work. Sometimes, it augments the story perfectly. Other times, we get a sense that it doesn’t quite fit.

For example, you may have a rugged and worn character who you’ve defined by his inability to tap into his emotion. Early on in the novel, he happens to encounter a glorious sunrise. You might be tempted to give him an overly sentimental bit of self-reflection here because it’s a nice moment to write about. But it’s not the right time for that character to be moved to tears by such epiphanies. That moment happens later in the novel, and not as the result of a random sunset, but because of the events of the story.

While revising, you may sense that a moment like this feels uncharacteristic, and takes away from the power of his ultimate transformation. But because you’ve fallen in love with the writing, you ignore the gaping edges and just add more duct tape.

As beautiful as that scene is, if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be. No matter how you justify it (“it’s character/world/theme building!”) the only thing it will do is distract the reader from the main quest while you lead them down a side path to look at something pretty.

But never fear, because you’re never throwing away those pieces for good. In fact, you’re better off saving them for another story (or later in the same story), where they might actually belong.

2. Try rewriting problematic passages in a completely different style

Maybe you’ve identified a sentence or passage that just doesn’t land well, but no matter how many times you rewrite it, you can’t make it work. What you’re doing in that moment is microscopic, deleting and rewriting the same words over and over.

So to break the cycle, mix it up and rewrite that section in a completely different style. If it’s prose, make it a poem or script. If it’s in the third person, write it in first. If it’s Proust-like, try making it Hemingway-esque. If it’s in the voice of an adult, retell it from a child’s point of view. Or describe the scene from the point of view of another character, your story villain, a deaf person, a blind person, or even the family dog.

Of course, I’m not suggesting the result is what will make the final draft. But what this exercise might do is shake a few nuts and bolts loose in the old creative noggin’ and give you fresh inspiration on a tired passage, which you can then rewrite anew in its original style.

3. Give yourself the freedom to retrace your steps

This can be a scary exercise, so bear with me. If you feel like your entire scene, story, or novel as a whole is not hitting home, it could be that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe you even sensed it after it happened, but because you were so far in, you felt you had to keep going.

Give yourself the freedom to go back to the moment you took that wrong turn and throw everything else out. (I warned you this was scary!) Ask yourself, “Had I gone in this other direction instead, what might have happened next?” Work through that route in your head and watch where you end up. How does it feel now? Is this the place your story was truly meant to reach?

Once you’ve found the right path, keep your eye on the prize. You’re going to be erasing a lot of really hard-won work, but the result will be worth it. And chances are, you’ll find a way to salvage at least some of what you’ve written — either in this present story or in others down the road.

4. Leave out the parts that people skip

If your scenes feel sluggish, they may be sandwiched between chaff. Maybe you felt the need to open the scene with a bit of place setting (“it was a dark and stormy night”). Or perhaps at the end, you weren’t sure how to conclude things, so you trailed off with your narrator thinking about what had just happened and remembering their convictions.

That technique isn’t inherently bad. What’s bad is if you use it in every scene because you can’t find the real entrance and exit.

I’ve seen many authors give this advice, but my favorite quote comes from Elmore Leonard. He said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Instead of wading slowly into your scene, try jumping straight into the deep end. If it trails off at the end, cut off the bloat and give the last vital thing you’ve said room to breathe.

You can also use this advice to trim unnecessary dialogue tags. A fundamental truth in writing is that you don’t need adverbs to spice up dialogue, and the word “said” is perfectly acceptable.

In fact, as readers are imagining a conversation in their heads, they’ll likely keep pace by skipping everything that’s not in quotation marks. So unless you mean for the conversation to pause for a bit of vital action or nonverbal expression, keep it trim, Slim.

5. Question yourself as the writer, not as the editor.

When we rewrite, we often put ourselves in the headspace of a different person. Maybe we imagine ourselves as a reader, an editor, or a “better” author — real or conceptual.

But this imagined person doesn’t speak with our original writers’ voice, and if we become too distant from that, we may lose touch with the soul of the story.

The raw piece we created was the purest, most authentic expression of our initial vision. Our job in revision is not to come in from the outside and change it for the sake of fitting some mold, but to sculpt it from within to become even truer.

Yes, your first pass might look through the lens of outward convention. Removing unnecessary adverbs, typos, redundancy, cliches, tropes, purple prose, etc.

But your deeper passes should try to look from within. Don’t just read through your work and ask “would this sell?” or “does this sound like professionally published writing?” Instead, tap into the soul of the story with questions like:

• What is the purpose of this scene? Does it accomplish its purpose?
• How does that purpose serve the overall narrative? Would the narrative make sense without it?
• Does it say too much here? Or, conversely, is there more here that’s trying to be said?
• Does this section go where it wants to go naturally? Or does it feel like I’m straining at the leash to pull it along? If so, where does it want to go instead?
• How does this scene make me feel? Do I feel differently about the story as a whole after reading it, or does it have no effect?
• If something digresses or breaks the “rules”, does that serve its purpose? Or is it a mere distraction?
• Am I drawing things in two dimensions rather than showing them alive?
• Does each moment actively move the story toward its goals?
• Is this piece actually part of this story, or meant for something else?

You don’t write a bestseller by force-fitting your voice into some mold. You write a bestseller by helping your own voice be heard as clearly and authentically as you originally intended.

Bonus Advice: Just Let It Go

The nature of art is that it’s never perfect. There is no defining moment when you know for certain your work is done. Instead, infinite changes can be made, and after a certain point, you’ll end up so far removed from your original inspiration, the result will be beaten lifeless.

If you find yourself losing all interest in your project, chances are you’ve gone too far. If “good enough is good enough” then submit it and walk away.

Or, if you really think it hasn’t matured to its full potential yet, do what the winemakers do. Shove it into a dark place and let it age a bit. When you come back to it, you’ll have a fresh perspective on what needs to be changed.

Happy Revising!

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Five Strategies for Polishing Prose was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.