tools for rewriting

Some writers don’t rewrite; others do. I’m among the latter – by the time a story goes out, it’s passed beneath my eyes at least four or five times, often significantly more, and at least one of those passes has been a read-aloud. If that’s not your style, perhaps you’ll prefer this story prompt, this post on three things that end a story well, or the always popular Rambo Cat. If you’re with me in a preference for the polished, though, here’s some techniques for fine-tuning prose.

Towards the end of working on something, you often get weary. You’ve looked at that sentence so many times it’s become meaningless. Perhaps you reach the point of the final polish and think, “Well, it’s good enough already.” It’s not. Give it one last gloss, one last rub of the magic word-rag to bring its surface up to such a mirror-bright sheen that the editor can see their humanity reflected in it.

Talking to a friend, I compared this to going over each paragraph looking for zits, words or phrases that are little ugly clots marring the sentence. Groom the prose like a show pony, trimming dead-ends of lifeless conjunctions or combing sentences into parallel structure in order to bring them to a glossy shine.

The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for finding random input to use when rewriting is Stumbleupon.

For example, that’s how I found this marvelous tool, the N+7 Machine. It describes itself thusly:

The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. Here you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following.

I have a story, “The Ghost Eater,” that’s been sitting for a while that I need to return to, so to whack myself on the side of the head and inspire an interesting rewrite, I ran the first two paragraphs through it, in the hopes that looking at them might spark some new ideas that I could use in mapping out my strategy for the rewrite.