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."

3. Connotation

Language isn't just denotative; it's also connotative. Often, in early drafts of work, writers don't catch words that might suggest attitudes, values, and so forth that run counter to their character's attitudes and values. Certain words or phrases have distinctly negative connotations.

For example, which expression has greater negative connotation: "failing," "missing the mark," or "going down the tubes"? The answer might well depend on the context—probably does—but I'd say, offhand, that "going down the tubes" probably does.

This can change; the language is always changing as words take on different connotative values as they're used in new contexts. At any rate, be sensitive to connotation as it relates to your character.

If your third-person narrator says your character's business is "in the red," the wording will sound less negative than "going down the tubes." Of course, you may want to choose the more negative connotative expression if the character himself feels this way.

My only point is to be aware of the connotative value of words and expressions and to make choices that work well with your character. You may find that you have a lot of fine-tuning to do in terms of connotation. The language is alive with connotation. It's easy to forget this. We often become abruptly aware of it when we unwisely choose a word or expression that offends other people.

4. Use of Jargon

This is a special diction question. If you've used a lot of jargon, you'll need to decide if you should make the language more accessible to your reader. Otherwise, you will limit your readership. If your writing is energetic enough, readers might be willing to look up the words—or wait for the meaning to reveal itself through the dramatic movement of the story.

Using Effective Language to Hone Description

He was thin, strong, and tanned, and had unusual blond hair—the kind girls went for.

Is this descriptive? Pretty general, isn't it? Can you see this character? If you can, you've filled in the details on your own. It might be okay for a general sense—and perhaps the author will draw you in more indirectly, through dramatic means, but don't mistake this line for concrete description. It's based on four adjectives that don't place us in a world of the five senses.

The following description of Russell "Curly" Norrys in Geoffrey Clark's "Two, Two, Lily-White Boys" does a much better job—I've underlined the adjectives:

He was lean and wiry and easily three or four inches taller than me and his skin looked like butterscotch—he'd likely spent a lot of time in the sun. Everything about him seemed finely and delicately made: his thin nose with flaring nostrils, his long limbs—even his hands and fingers—covered with fine blond hair, his eyes brown; but what you focused on most was his hair: a dark golden mass of corkscrew blond curls, the kind some girls would kill to have. But what really struck me were his hands, for his fingers were very thin and extremely long.

The adjectives here work with the specific details to create a visual, memorable picture of Curly: his physical build, his facial features, his eyes, hair, fingers. How thorough this is! And how nicely compressed. If you've worked with direct (versus indirect) description in this manner, and you are in the fine-tuning stage, your job now is to be sure your writing is this concrete—unless, as I said before, you want to create a general impression. But don't mistake a general impression for concrete description.

Also, take note of the punctuation and sentence structure in the example above—all those commas, em dashes, colons, and semicolons. This sentence is structured grammatically correct. I always say to read professional authors' works and see how they write. This is a proven example. You never know what to expect with diction or sentence structure until you turn the page! See what you can learn from the next published book you pick up. Try to copy it in your writing and see how it turns out.

Sentence Issues

Fine-tuning includes all levels of language, from word to sentence, from sentence to paragraph. If you've worked to rid your draft of wordiness, you've already addressed the individual sentence. But another sentence issue awaits your attention, a key issue which has to do with construction: active versus passive.

Active Versus Passive Construction

Active verb constructions like, "The dog bit him," instead of, "He was bitten by the dog," give your writing verve and energy. And yet, there are no hard-and-fast rules.

Let's say you want to show a character's passivity. Instead of the active construction —"Susan packaged up the materials, one by one"—you go with: "The materials were packed up one by one, by Susan." Not a good sentence if one goes by the handbooks, but in the right context, if Susan is utterly exhausted, just going through the motions, this might work better than the active construction.

It's important to know the difference between the active and the passive construction so that you can make the best choice based on the needs of character and circumstance. Most writers go with the active, generally, and are open to the passive when the specific need arises.

Making the Writing Move: Sentence to Sentence

Certainly, much of fine-tuning consists of attending to the way the writing is moving—or not moving—from one sentence to another. If every sentence is a simple one, then your language might sound pretty clunky unless the prose style somehow reflects your characters, events, and setting. Everything depends on context.

Sometimes a series of fragments works well. Sometimes a periodic sentence (where the main idea is suspended until the end) works well; sometimes a loose one (where the main idea comes first, followed by phrases/clauses) works better. Sometimes long sentences are needed, sometimes short ones.

You've been making judgments about these issues since you started working on style. You've tried to generate a style that creates the right voice for your work, and in places, the style has probably varied. Now, it's time to fine-tune your prose to make sure it's really working. Here's a process to follow:

1. Study the four sentence types: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. You can find these in any grammar handbook and certainly on the Internet. Get a good working sense of these sentence types. As you read fiction, notice how sentence types are varied. Try varying sentence types in your own work. Judge the effects of doing so.

2. Find places in your manuscript where prose sounds like it's working. Pick a half dozen paragraphs of different kinds—exposition, description, and narrative summary—and study these places for the way the sentences are working. Why is the prose working? Did you vary sentence types? Is it the amount of detail you've used? The word choice? The pacing? Is it certain stylistic devices you've used like alliteration and repetition?

3. Find places in your manuscript where the prose isn't working. What have you done differently here? Why don't these passages sound as good as the ones you've marked as good?

4. Once you've isolated the problems, apply what you've learned from the previous steps and search through your manuscript once more. This might mean combining sentences, eliminating some sentences, and rearranging sentences to give the writing more polish. It might also mean changing style to one that works better—one that has more force. When you're fine-tuning, the more you look, the more you find.

Basic Grammar and Mechanics

Basic grammar covers a number of issues: subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, and tense issues. Under the heading of mechanics, I'll throw in spelling and some basic punctuation issues.

First, let me say that with creative writing, you can certainly take liberties with basic grammar as well as mechanics. The most obvious example is the uneducated I-narrator, or even the third-person narrator whose voice is adapted to the character—embedding a voice to go with this character. If it works, you can certainly break all the rules of grammar and mechanics. On the other hand, if you're writing in a formal or even neutral style about fairly educated people—doctors, lawyers, teachers—then grammar and mechanics errors will appear to be just that: errors.

Let's think of everything—including grammar and mechanics—as purpose driven. If dialogue works better with single quotation marks around it (like the Brits do), then go for it. Comma splices are sometimes used to move readers more quickly from one sentence to another. Apostrophes are left out in contractions. These kinds of things are open to creative judgment.

If you're unsure of grammatical rules and conventions, search the Internet or buy a college-level grammar handbook. A great college-level grammar handbook that's easy to understand for those who don't remember anything from elementary school is "Grammar to Go: How It Works and How to Use It" by Barbara Goldstein, Jack Waugh, and Karen Linsky. I currently have the 5th edition, and it comes as a workbook (with the answers in the back), so it's great for practicing and really applying what you learn as you go.

But be ready to break from the conventions in the interests of creativity. It's knowing when to break the conventions that matter. Nothing is "wrong" unless it's out of sync with your characters and their world. If it's in sync, anything goes.

Accuracy of Real-World Details

Naturally, if you are writing realistic fiction, you need to get certain facts straight. If you're taking liberties with reality and everything else about your story seems to be off-center a little, then no, you don't have to worry about this. Otherwise, you don't want to get the wrong date for when a celebrity died, the wrong assassin of a notable historical figure, or the wrong details about a particular kind of business operation, medical procedure, or governmental policy, past or present. Do the necessary research. Factual errors will jerk your reader out of the story, make you seem like an amateur, and might even halt them from finishing your story.

Summing Up

When you fine-tune, you are often dealing with surface-level changes, but sometimes these can lead to changes that go deeper into character and even plot, and certainly tone. One thing to polish is your prose style. Even if you thought you had taken care of stylistic matters after you revised for style, you will probably find places in your manuscript that need some attending to.

It's a good idea to read straight through your story as quickly as you can to make sure it reads the way you want it to, that it sounds the way you want it to. If it's clunky in places, give those places the attention they need.

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