by Sybil Johnson
My apologies for missing my last posting date. I was in Seattle for my mother’s 104th(!) birthday. I’m home now and putting the finishing touches on a short story I’ve been working on for far too long.
Whenever I work on a story, whether it’s a short story or a book, I have a process that I go through at the very end. When I think I’ve got the story down and it’s about ready for someone to read, I do a final checklist of things. Here are some of the things I do:
- Look for awkward wording and fix it. I read the story to myself out loud. That helps me catch these.
- Look over the timeline of events and make sure it all makes sense.
- Read the dialog in each scene out loud without the surrounding prose. This helps me pick out things that don’t make sense or are awkward.
- Make sure that all important questions have been answered. Check for anything I need to clarify for the reader.
- Check consistency of words. Things like “back yard” vs. “backyard” or “T-shirt” vs. “t-shirt”. I don’t much care which I use, just that’s it consistent throughout the story.
- Check to make sure there are no two spaces where there should be one. Look for missing periods at end of sentences. Run it through spell-check.
After I’ve done all that to my satisfaction and, after a final read-through, it’s ready to hand over to my first reader, usually the husband. He tells me when he doesn’t understand something or if he doesn’t know who’s talking in a dialog sequence. Stuff like that.
For the writers out there, what kind of process do you use to put the finishing touches on a story?
