Poetry and Short Stories

Now that the story is written, what's next?

Now that you've finished writing the story, what's next?

You've spent hours, days, weeks, maybe months. You've sweated, chewed the eraser off of your pencil and paced. Finished. At last, you're finished. Your story starts, continues through the middle and has a satisfying conclusion.

So now what do you do?

Your immediate tendency is to send it out to publishers and hope for an acceptance.

You're surprised when you get one rejection letter after another.

Why? Why don't they see the great masterpiece you do?

The easy answer is because they can't read your mind.
The harder answer is because you didn't do enough rewrites before you sent it tothem.

How do you fix this?

Do several rewrites.

When you do a rewrite, you are looking for several things:
First, you are looking for misspelled words, poor punctuation and other grammar problems.
Second, you are looking for plot holes and inconsistencies.
Third, you are reality checking.
Fourth, you are reading to make sure that the image you have in your mind is satisfactorily transmitted to the reader via the words you've chosen to use.

Here's an example:

You are describing your hero sneaking up on the bad guy. You can see him clearly. He's wearing a set of leather armor, which creaks when he moves. He's clutching a dagger in his right hand. He's plastered against the wall and sliding carefully along it, sweat beading on his forehead, his eyes fixed on the open door he's trying to reach without getting caught.

You describe the scene like this:

Sir. Thomas sneaked up to the door and looked into the room.

Do you honestly believe any of your readers will see the same picture you do when they read that sentence? Not a chance. Worse, the editor you sent that to is going to bounce it right back and tell you that the story is boring, needs action.

Here's another example:

You have set up a situation where the hero has taken a bio-break behind some bushes and set his sword on the ground while doing so. He's startled in the middle of doing his duty. He jumps to his feet, yanks up his pants and flees. You did NOT have him pick his sword up, so logically, it's still laying on the ground. That's where the reader is going to expect it to remain. Yet three paragraphs later, you have him swinging that sword at a nasty beast he encounters. What's wrong with that? It doesn't reality check. Fix it by making sure he picks up the sword after he yanks up his pants and before he flees.

Here's a third example:

You've described the setting as being an old house with a rickety set of stairs leading to the top floor. You have the hero climb the stairs in the opening chapter and describe the creaks they make.

Three chapters later, the hero hears someone downstairs and needs to see who it is, but without being seen. You write:

Jim descended the stairs quietly and glanced into the old dining room.

What's wrong with that?
First of all, those stairs creak. Jim should do more than just descend them quietly, or they should creak because he forgot and stepped on them wrong.
Second, there's no tension. Instead of being an emotional scene, the reader is cheated out of biting off a few fingernails. A change in wording would fix that. That, and remembering to have Jim deal with
the creaking stairs.

Several things you can do to ensure your rewrites get the most mileage:
1. Hand out your story to people you know and ask them for feedback. Do NOT tell them what you want them to look for, just tell them to tell you what they think, what they like, what they didn't like, and why.
2. Hand out your story to people you don't know and ask for feedback. Join a crit group or a writing group.
3. Take all the feedback, make changes in the story, and then hand the revision out again.
4. Get a program that reads text outloud and have it read your story to you. You'll be surprised just how many problems you notice that you missed when trying to read the story yourself, even if you read it outloud.

Once you have gone over the story enough times, done several revisions, and run it through a reading program, put it away. Go do something else for a few weeks. Leave it sit for a month, then take it out of mothballs and read it over. If you're still happy with it, then start submitting it for possible publication. Chances are good that it'll get accepted without too much of a problem.

If you're not happy with it, start on the next round of revisions and feedback.