Craft Notes: Final Revisions

Or, I'm a tortured poet.

Last week I finished a draft of a book to send to my agent. (Fingers crossed!) My last stage is to always go through and do a search for overused words and phrases. My personal list includes:

• it seemed

• she/he thought

• started to

• just

• looked

• nodded

• that

• really

• looked

• shrugged

I don’t love this work, but sometimes it reveals something startling. A change in one word makes me re-write the whole sentence into something special or surprising. It stops being a find and replace exercise and turns into real revision.

But, because it’s the last step and I just want to be done, it’s a bit of torture, too. So I listened to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets’ Department and thought, “Same, Taylor. Same.”