- Does it have a good story arc? Has the main character changed by the end of the story? Are your characters rounded, believable and consistent?
- Look closely at your expression. Are there any paragraphs that are too long? Do you have a mixture of shorter and longer sentences? Do you have a good balance of action, dialogue, description, inner monologue and exposition- with as little as possible of the last one? Are the tension and pace balanced? Are there clichés you could replace? Is there repetition? Do mean what you say and say what you mean? Are you showing more than telling and where you are telling is this the right place?
- Now read it out loud. You’ll spot mistakes you’ve not noticed yet. You’ll also notice anything that might jar the reader. Perhaps your pet dog or cat may be willing to listen.
- Now for a proof read. Maybe change the font and line spacing for this and read it slowly. You’re looking for remaining typos, punctuation, mistakes and inconsistencies in spellings.
- One more proof read deliberately looking for those mistakes you always make; my favourite is ‘form’ instead of ‘from’.
- Finally check for presentation. No surprising gaps anywhere? Are section breaks where they’re supposed to be? Your word-processing programme hasn’t done anything weird with the formatting?
Hint: start each check at a different point in the story – this will stop you skimming at the end.
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