#0049 The Nine Draft Process Part Five: The Polished Draft

This is the next entry in The Nine Draft Process, which is the method I’ve successfully used to write four books. I’m hoping that sharing this information will benefit other authors as they search for their own way of converting ideas into books.

In these blog entries I’m using my novel, He’s Going to Kill You (HGTKY), as an example. So I highly recommend reading it first because there will likely be some spoilers in these blog entries.

Before we get started, let’s reflect on the previous parts:

• Part Zero is an introduction to the process. I recommend starting there.

• Part One is about the Conceptual Draft, which is the first step. Here, we recorded our brainstorming for future use.

• Part Two is about the Outline Draft. Here, we transformed out Conceptual Draft into an outline, while starting our Book Atlas.

• Part Three is about the Flat Draft. In this step, we focus on converting our outline into a first draft, while keeping our Book Atlas updated.

• Part Four is about the Focused Draft. In this step, we focus on improving each chapter individually, while keeping our Book Atlas update. Spoiler, we always keep our Book Atlas updated or we'll regret it later.

• Part Five is about the Polished Draft. This step is split into two phases: An editing phase and a read through phase. I consider this the most painful part of the nine draft process. Good luck.

Phase One: Editing

--Que ominous music--

So we have our completed focused draft from Part Four.

We'll now it's time to edit it. We're too poor to hire a professional editor, so we'll need to do it ourselves. If you can spare the money, I'd recommend purchase ProWritingAid (PWA). It's actually reasonably priced, in my opinion, and it's a gazillion dollars cheaper than an editor. My instructions moving forward will be geared toward using PWA. Without it, you'll have a very difficult time, but it's not impossible.

You can open your manuscript with PWA, and run reports. That's what we'll be doing here.

If you're using PWA and experience lag with the software, your document may be too large. Mine have been. So I split my word document into separate documents by chapter. Microsoft Word has a built in function for doing this, and you can later recombine the documents with easy. You'll need to Google how to do that because it's a little too complicated and off topic to include here.

Once you've opened your manuscript or a chapter of your manuscript with PWA, it's time to have some pain. I mean fun. So, PWA has a lot of reports that it can run for you. I recommend using the following to assist with editing your manuscript.

1. Goal list. For me, this pops up in a little side bar. There's an option to choose what I'm writing such as General Fiction, Horror, Business Email, etc. Depending on what you choose, it'll set goals based on trends from popular works in the same wheel house. The Goal list checks sentence length, glue index, readability, sentence variety, passive voice, complex paragraphs, conjunction starts, pacing, emotion tells, -ing starts, dialogue tags, and more. The software gives you pass or fail information, and I recommend attempting to pass most of the categories and be aware and okay with the ones that aren't passing. You can click on each category to get more details about it and see where there might be problems. Very helpful.

2. Overuse report. PWA also has a report that shows words that are being overused. It ignores words like "the" and other common words that will always be recurring. This report is helpful in adding some variety to your language since we all fall into slumps where we overuse a term. Sometimes it's challenging to bring these numbers into a tolerable range, but at the very least, the report makes you aware of potential issues.

3. Echo report. Similar to the previous, this report focuses on words that are repeated in proximity. I don't always make changes when these are identified, but it's worth consideration.

4. Improvement list. This is a tab on the same bar as the Goal list, and is geared toward helping improve grammar, spelling, etc. I make a lot of changes based on this one. This may also fix non-breaking hyphens, which I've got a note to let it do because my hyphens may otherwise cause my formatting software to malfunction.

5. Sticky sentence report. This one can also be useful, but I don't always use it.

Besides the PWA reports listed, it's a good idea to also consider identifying and removing weak qualifiers and unnecessary adverbs, adjectives, and dialogue tags. Also, it's a good idea to look for and remove hidden verbs. The most common item we can remove is the word "very," which I recommend searching your document for and potentially removing all finds. The goal here is to have the same sentence with less words, where applicable.

A good thought to remember when editing is to think of each sentence as its own story, and then determine how it contributes to the overall paragraph or chapter.

And that's Phase One. It takes forever and is very painful, but you have to take the time to perfect your text as much as possible. Most successful authors have someone else do this for them, but we don't have that kind of money. So we have to play both roles.

Phase Two: Read Through

--Que Louder Ominous Music--

If you survive phase one, it's time to put everything back into a single document and read through your manuscript as if you've never read it before. Go slow and try to absorb each sentence and each word. If you get hasty, you'll miss something. I recommend reading aloud.

As you read, check for inconsistencies with your Book Atlas and check for issues with tenses, POV, and pronoun usages. Try to identify and bridge gaps between your intention as an author and your understanding as a reader.

Again, this might be the homestretch of Part Five, but it's important to go slow. You shouldn't read this as your manuscript. You should read this as if it were a finished book you've purchased. It's difficult to put yourself in this mindset, but it's important to try.

And that's Phase Two. Much easier, but can still take a while.

Here's the HGTKY Polished Draft 1st chapter for reference. You can compare it to the previous file to see the differences.

Next time, we'll tackle Part Six The Proofed Draft.