The Single Best Tool for Revising

 
There are lots of great tools available today to help us with revisions.
 
The dictionary is an obvious one, although I’d argue the thesaurus is even better. Spellcheck, of course. (“F-7 is your friend,” was one of my most common phrases when I was an instructor.) And as I’ve mentioned in another post, using the “find” function can really help with replacing overused words and phrases, as well as give you the minor-league superpower of viewing your work out of context.
 
And having others look at your work can be very useful—almost mandatory—before submitting. Not only will a good beta catch stuff you’ve missed (because you’ve seen it too much to even see it anymore), but they can point out where things may be unclear to the reader (again, because you’re so close to it that you know things about the story that may not actually be on the page).
 
However, the best tool of all may simply be your gut.
 
Another term for this might be: your attention span. Or: your sense of boredom. Or probably most accurate of all: that vague feeling of “less-than-perfect-but-good-enough.” But those terms are clunky (my personal name for when I think my writing may be technically “ok” but doesn’t read smoothly and is inelegant at best) so we’re going with gut.
 
But how do we employ our gut? Is there a shortcut command? Maybe “Shift-Alt-G”?
 
Nope. We listen. It’s not analysis, it’s awareness. Feeling, rather than thought. To the point where if we overthink it, it goes away. Like most things having to do with creativity.
 
Let’s define our default emotional state when reading writing that “works” (whatever that means to you) as engaged. You’re in the story, to one degree or another. But as you read through your story (i.e. going through your manuscript as a reader) you may come across some areas where you find your attention momentarily drifting away from the story. Or you find yourself suddenly reading at a pace that’s higher than usual, perhaps even full-on skimming. Or you might get the thought: yeah, yeah, I know what happens here, let’s just get to the next part, then jump ahead to the next significant scene.
 
When any of this happens, stop.
 
Go back. Right to the spot where you first noticed your engagement with the story lessening or your attention drifting or your reading becoming more shallow. Something there was not right. Not necessarily wrong, just not quite right. Which makes it all the more difficult, because when something’s definitely wrong, we recognize it and we fix it, from a poorly worded run-on sentence to a mix of tenses so confusing even we don’t know what happened when, all the way to technical glitches like spelling/grammar/punctuation. (I’m talking about basic copyedit stuff here. Which, as I’ve mentioned previously, really has nothing to do with why we revise, or what an editor does to a manuscript.)
 
No, what we’re concerned about here aren’t the obvious blunders, but those areas where the writing just doesn’t float. Or run. Or even walk briskly. Instead it just kind of lays there, blatantly disengaging us. Boring us. Or even confusing us. So go back, carefully re-read the part you wanted to skip, and re-phrase it. Or tighten it. Or maybe cut it entirely. I think the key here is to be willing to try different iterations of the same basic concept until it not only says what you want to say, but does so in a way that continues the tone you want the story to have. And when you’re trying on these variations of the offending sentence, do your best to have your “reader” hat on, not your “writer” hat, maybe backing up a paragraph or two to get a running start at it, in context, and see how it flows with the text immediately before and after the passage in question.
 
It seems like 90% of the time the final (“improved”) wording is shorter than the original. So first consider what you can trim and still have the sentence make sense. Try reading the overall passage without the questionable sentence at all, then add back just enough to convey your meaning. When someone (which includes “Mark” for values of someone) is really stuck on a wordy, clunky-yet-necessary sentence, sometimes I’ll say, “Look away from the manuscript. Now, just put it in your own words. What are you trying to say?” And often a completely new phrasing of the idea—rather than a variation on the original text—flows better, and is tighter and more direct and/or less confusing.
 
So yes, we definitely use technical writing craft to improve things once we’ve identified less-than-stellar writing in our work. But for the important part—the actual act of identifying the passages where things are “okay” but could absolutely be better--we need to be in tune with our most valuable revision tool. Our gut.