The final draft pulls your manuscript into shape. As an important part of the process of writing a mystery, final draft is a series of last judgments. You make judgments on character and style, on rhythm and pace and dialogue, on object and plot and subplot. In the final draft, you polish up your prose. You read and you make judgments and you cut and you rewrite, converting a passage that tells into a passage that shows. In the following example, the writing moves from “telling” to “showing” as the writer moves through the first and second drafts to final draft.
First Draft: “I looked at the corpse. It was a young woman, a girl perhaps. She was too far away to tell exactly. How terribly sad it was to see death come to one so young.”
Second Draft: “I looked at the corpse, a young woman, or perhaps a girl. She wore a red dress. Her teeth stuck out. Her arms were bent at the elbow. She wore a raincoat, sadly tattered. There were marks on her throat.”
Final Draft: “The corpse lay in the snow, hands across her chest, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for the Handsome Prince. Pale face, all the blood drained out. Pale eyes and white eyebrows, pale hair, very pale lips. The lips were puckered, as if waiting for a kiss. I knelt down beside the body. Bite marks on her throat, dents in the skin, and droplets of dried blood. Her dead eyes stared up at me. I felt a shiver. Her teeth were lined up like little white gravestones. Like the others, she had no name. She was victim number six.”
The detail becomes more specific with each draft. As the detail piles up, the thoughts and images inside the writer’s head become word pictures on the page. As the word pictures take shape, the writing voice rings with confidence. Instead of telling the reader how the sleuth feels with adverbs (terribly sad, sadly tattered), the writer contains emotion (the sadness of innocence wasted by early death) in the detail: “Her dead eyes stared up at me. I felt a shiver. Her teeth were lined up like little white gravestones.”
When you rewrite for your final draft, the work is more fun because your story is plotted. You know where it twists and turns, where it peaks at the climax. The writing you do for final draft knits up the few loose threads that remain. Because of the hard work on character and dialogue, most of the writing is solid. Act Two might need tightening. A few scenes might need repairs. Some key passages might need rewriting.
You locate those passages by reading the manuscript. Reading is step one of the work on final draft. Step two is cutting, pruning, weeding. Step three is rewriting.
1. Read the Manuscript.
Read straight through the book, taking notes as you go. There’s a checklist at the end of this reading section. If you’ve been hungry for feedback, now is the time to ask for it. An efficient way to get feedback at this point is to use your writing friends as readers. They read; you listen and take notes. If you decide to use your friends, you’ll get more insights into the writing by planning ahead.
For example, read through the book quickly, making notes, to select half a dozen scenes that need work. Before you rewrite the scenes, cast your friends into character roles. Select a time for the reading. As you listen, envision your writing as theater. Does each scene have a climax? Is the conflict clear? Do the readers stumble over specific passages? Is there too much narrative summary? Does one character hog the dialogue?
Handing over your manuscript is a symbolic act, the writer connecting with the world. Listening to your words coming out of strange mouths provides instant perspective, a fresh look at your work.
Take lots of notes. You’re weighing the larger elements of your story, seeking insights into shape and weight and proportion. Is there too much killing? Can you shift some killing offstage, the way Martin Cruz Smith shifts Osborne’s gutting of Kirwill near the end of Gorky Park? Is there too much blood? Not enough blood? Are there enough bodies? Is the stack of bodies high enough to condemn your killer for punishment? When is the killer revealed to the sleuth? To the reader? Are there too many witness interviews mashed too close together?
A lot of writers make notes on the pages of the manuscript. When the writing overflows the manuscript, move your note taking to an edit book. An edit book is a separate notebook dedicated to the final draft. If you’re reading straight through, you have separate sections for Acts One, Two and Three. You might devote a page in the edit book to the crime scene, to the first encounter, to each re-creation of the crime (a page for each), the most important witness interviews, the longest suspect interrogation, the killer confrontation, and the sleuth’s reward. If one of your characters has a long monologue, one that runs over a hundred words, jot down its position in the structure (“Catalyst Monologue, Act Two, between midpoint and plot point two. Check it out for length”) and keep reading.
Your notes might be questions you ask yourself: “Where can I move this scene? Where would it work better? Plot point two? Midpoint? To open Act Three?”
Your notes can be reminders to yourself: “Rework the dialogue in the first encounter. They barely know each other. Yet they’re bickering like an old married couple. Remember to make a list of objects, Remember to use the objects in the dialogue lines. ‘Hand me that towel, Charlotte.’ Set the reader up for the next encounter.”
When you read with a pencil in hand you get insights into plot and character, scene and style. If you’re reading a dialogue and lines come to you, jot them down in your edit book. Five minutes of dialogue now might make the book a prize winner. You can write faster if you don’t use quotes. Or attributions like he said/she said:
Hello, Marshal.
Hello, Major.
Hot enough for you?
Yes. I’ve come to ask you something.
Sounds official, Marshal, when you use that tone.
It’s about Lacey Anne.
Come on in. I’ll get Ripley to mix you a toddy.
Nothing for me. Thanks.
So. What is it, Marshal?
Did Lacey Anne want to leave the island?
What kid doesn’t? Hellfire, I felt trapped here myself when I was her age.
Did she want to leave the island so she could sing with that boy’s band?
Every kid has big dreams, Marshal.
Just answer the question, okay?
You want to know was this Julius B. fellow coming to take a meeting. Is that it?
Was he?
Okay. Okay, She called me from town. From that dump on Eddie’s side of the marina.…
• • •
2. Read with this Checklist in Hand.
• Character Check:
Are your characters motivated? Does the reader know what each character wants? Are the character agendas clear? When the character enters the story, is there enough physical detail to make a sharp first impression? Which characters are concealed behind masks? Where are they unmasked? Which characters reveal everything with their first entrance, their first speech? Who changes in the story? Where in the structure do the character changes take place? Who stays the same? How have you marked the killer for the reader?
• Dialogue/Monologue Check:
For each scene, check to see which character has the power in the dialogue. Who’s on the offensive? Who’s playing defense? Does the dialogue move in a rhythm of one-two, one-two? Have you connected some dialogue lines to objects in the setting? Which character evokes the past? What is the reason for evoking the past? Where does the dialogue rise to a climax? How long are the monologues? How many monologues are there? Can you compress the monologue?
• Setting Check:
How does the reader know the time and place for each scene? The season? The temperature? Where is the light source? Where are the shadows? What image in the beginning of the book comes back to create closure at the end? What objects in one scene connect to objects in another scene?
• Action Check:
Does each action have a reaction that closes the loop for the reader? Do the actions and reactions work in a chain, grabbing the reader’s attention, building to a climax? Is your action written with strong verbs?
• Scene Check:
Does the scene build to a climax? How does the scene hook to the next scene? What character agendas clash to create dramatic conflict? If the scene lacks dramatic conflict, what is your plan? Will you rewrite? Or will you cut?
• Subplots:
Have you identified each subplot? Are you tracking the subplots with scene cards and lists? Do you know where each subplot begins and ends? Have you named your subplots (e.g., the Kirwill subplot, the Police subplot) to help you keep them separate until you decide to bring them together? Which of your subplots converge for your killer confrontation?
3. Cutting the Manuscript.
Cutting is hard to do. You’ve written these words. You’ve sweated blood to build this book. For almost a year, on every weekend and often during the week, you have toiled in the vineyard of words. You love this rich detail. You don’t want to cut.
Cutting clears away what doesn’t count, what’s not necessary for advancing the plot. Cutting sharpens the dialogue, the description, the action. Cutting is possible in the final draft because you see with new eyes. Material that was important in the first two drafts is no longer necessary. It was important for the creative process. It moved the characters from point A to point B, or from point Q to point R. But now that the book is almost done, you don’t need it.
Page count helps you decide to cut. The industry standard for mysteries by first-time writers is 250–300 pages. If the manuscript is too long—if it would make a book of 400-plus pages—then cutting becomes even more important.
When you wrote the first two drafts, you wrote several passages of narrative summary. When you read through the manuscript for final draft, you list the passages in your edit book—Narration 1, Narration 2, Narration 3, et cetera—including notes about subject, purpose, placement in the structure, and length. When you go back through the edit book, Narration 7, for example, might catch your eye. Let’s say the subject of Narration 7 is back story on the sleuth. The stated purpose is “to provide information to the reader necessary for understanding the sleuth’s emotional commitment to the killer quest.” The placement of Narration 7 is central: it ends Act One and it also begins Act Two. The length is thirteen pages.
In mystery fiction, thirteen pages—even for a sizzling scene—is too long. Thinking back, you recall writing this piece late at night, well after midnight, in a blinding hour-long marathon. You recall the insights popping, the wonderful heat of creativity. This was a moment, rare in the writing game, where everything came together. At the time, you felt blessed. Now as you look over your edit book and your updated scene list, you realize that you have converted this lengthy narrative summary into six scenes.
Because you have used the material generated by midnight art, you cut this passage.
Sometimes feedback from friends tells you where to cut. At other times, you cut because the passage doesn’t feel right. Some of the most interesting final draft work can result when you cut adverbs.
4. Cut Those Adverbs.
An adverb is an adjective with -ly tacked on, a suffix attached like a tail. Adjectives modify nouns—the listless corpse—but when you add -ly on the end, transforming the adjective into an adverb, the function changes because adverbs modify verbs. In the phrase, “The corpse lolled listlessly on the coverlet,” the adverb “listlessly” describes the verb, which is lolled. Because they are polysyllabic, adverbs possess interesting rhythm. “Listlessly,” for example, has three syllables (list/less/ly) that explode with alliteration as the l-sound repeats itself. In this example, the repeated l-sounds in “LoLLed ListLessLy” weld the adverb to the verb.
Adverbs are handy when we speak. Adverbs help us to stall, to gain time while we craft a reply: “What I meant to imply, actually, was that the corpse was not lolling listlessly, in so many words, but that the mood of the crime scene itself was basically quite listless.”
When characters speak, they might use adverbs that mark their particular generation, their niche in this world. Adverbs, used properly, help the writer to develop character. Character G, a walk-on, might appear in a witness interview: “Right, so like, basically, I mean, it was like she majorly blew away the universe totally.” Character A, a hard-boiled cop, might reply by saying, “Show me where, bud.”
While adverbs might do good work in dialogue, they kill the rest of your writing dead because they hide word pictures. Let’s return to the listless corpse. Let’s say you’re rewriting the crime scene. In the first draft you wrote “listless corpse.” In the second draft you changed the sentence, expanding it something like this: “The corpse lolled listlessly.” And then, caught up in the sound of those alliterated l’s, you rewrote it again: “The luminous corpse lolled listlessly with eyelids of lustrous aluminum alkaloid.” While you’re having fun with alliteration, the story gets away from you. What’s fun for the writer is not always fun for the reader. You might know what you meant, what you intended to convey with the adverb. The reader won’t have a clue.
If you chop out the adverb, you’ll make a hole. From “the corpse lolled listlessly,” you chop out listlessly, making a hole. Following the procedure you learned from Character Work (Weekends 1–4) and from Scene Building (Weekends 10–13), you fill the hole with physical detail to create a word picture.
Position: “The listless corpse lay facedown on the coverlet. Her right arm reached out. The fingers of the right hand were frozen in an endless clutching motion.”
Wardrobe: “She wore a red dress. The hem of the dress had been ripped.”
Lighting: “Her face was in shadow.”
Wounds: “The rip in the dress opened into a wide gash that ran along the side of her body, rib cage to thigh. The backs of her legs looked scratched.”
Close-up: “Up close, the scratches became claw marks.”
When you cut away adverbs, you make room for better writing. Adverbs take up space without doing much work on the page. Cutting out adverbs will help you write a cleaner, sharper final draft that gives your reader images.
5. Plan Your Rewrite.
Sometimes you write from the gut. You let go. You follow your instinct. You write with heat and clarity and maximum force. At other times you need a plan. You read. You take notes. You plan out your work by the weekend, the day, the hour. “Saturday A.M. 8–9. Rewrite the first encounter scene. Start with a scene profile. 10 minutes on the profile, 50 minutes on the scene. Hit the dialogue first. Then the action.”
The heart of rewriting the final draft is the scene profile. A scene profile takes ten to fifteen minutes. If your book has forty scenes, and if they all need some repairs, your scene profiles will take a total time of ten hours. That is time well spent. A fresh scene profile not only reminds you what the scene is about and where it fits in the story; it also contains the detail that could trigger your mind for a brilliant final draft. Doing a new scene profile takes some discipline. The payoff is tremendous.
To plan out your work for the final draft, revise your list of scenes. Divide the scenes into four groups: Act One; Act Two, first half; Act Two, second half; and Act Three. Grouping the scenes helps you focus on your midpoint. When you’re rewriting, it never hurts to take a second look.
In your rewriting plan, consider starting at midpoint and working your way through to the end, to killer confrontation and sleuth’s reward. You can start at midpoint now because you know the story. You know how it starts. You know why the killer killed and why the victim had to die. The hard part of the book, as you probably discovered when you wrote drafts one and two, is the stretch between midpoint and plot point two. The book thickens here. Lots of characters crowd the stage. Each character has an agenda that’s white hot. If the subplots get tangled, they get tangled here.
Starting your rewrite at midpoint helps you clear out the tangles. In your plan, you lay out the work for the second half of Act Two. Then you follow that with a plan for Act Three. Starting your final draft in the middle gives you flexibility and confidence.
If you’re hesitating about rewriting from midpoint, consider this: They shoot movies out of order. They shoot exteriors outside, on location. They shoot interiors inside, on a soundstage. They can shoot out of order because they know the story. Your goal is to produce a stunning manuscript. In mystery writing, the end (where the killer pays) dictates the beginning—the victim is dead, the killer is offstage chuckling, and the sleuth is busy taking inventory.
Before you say no to the rewrite that starts at midpoint, give it a try. Profile a couple of scenes from the center of Act Two. Profile the scene at midpoint and the scene that comes right after midpoint. Writing the final draft from midpoint gets you to the finish line faster. If it doesn’t feel right for you, if it doesn’t work, feel free to start your final draft in Act One, Scene One, Chapter One. Have fun with the rewriting. You worked hard getting here.
6. Keep the Rewrite Simple.
As we have suggested, good solid physical detail solves most problems in writing. When you describe your corpse, use body parts (pale blue eyes, albino hair, et cetera), wardrobe (gray stockings, gray half slip, gray panties, tawdry dress, et cetera), and wounds (bites along the throat, a chunk of flesh torn away exposing the jawbone, et cetera). When you bring a character into the story, combine body parts (her arms tucked tight like bird wings), with wardrobe (a satin gown with red spaghetti straps) and motion (walked toward me with jerky movements).
If grammar is not your greatest strength, you’d be smart to keep your sentences strong and simple. Avoid those tricky passive-voice verbs (the rifle was fired, the door had been thrown open, et cetera), and use the power of English by writing in the clean line of subject-verb-object: “The man fired his rifle.”
The subject is the man.
The verb is fired.
The object is rifle. This tight unit of subject plus verb plus object creates a consistent center for each sentence.
That same pattern, subject-verb-object, keeps you out of trouble whether you’re writing about the weather (“Rain flattened the grass”) or writing about politics (“Veep Lays Egg on TV”) or writing about a marriage foundering on the rocks (“Wife Stabs Errant Husband with Granny’s Heirloom Brooch”).
To embellish your writing, you can hang clauses on either end of the subject-verb-object structure. Here’s a clause hung on the front: “Without taking any apparent aim, Osborne fired his rifle.” Once you have the image (in this case an action image) locked in with subject-verb-object, you add a reaction to complete the information loop. When Osborne fires, the bullet hits an FBI agent: “Wesley’s head snapped, half its smooth forehead missing.…”
The key to a complete word-picture is action followed by reaction, a rhythm of one-two:
The word forehead, a body part, locks down the description. The word half shows the hitting power of the bullet at close range.
When you run across a passage that doesn’t sound right, check for adverbs first, verbs second. Cut the adverbs and fill the space, the hole in the passage left by the departed adverb. As you fill the hole, replace your weak verbs (think, know, believe, understand, imagine, opine, et cetera) with strong verbs (cut, slice, hammer, sew, knit, fire, snap, forge, prance, et cetera). Whether your sleuth is shooting or sewing, strong verbs show action:
thread the needle
bite the thread
slide the needle into the cloth
angle the needle into the tiny buttonhole
Strong verbs surface when your characters dance (pirouette, stomp, prance, twirl, romp, shuffle, trot, et cetera) or cut meat (skin, slice, chop, mince, et cetera) or play a sport (tackle, shoot, lob, stroke, dash, et cetera). One strong verb and some writing discipline can transform a flabby sentence into a passage that glows with hope and promise.
Flabby sentence: Deep inside her mind, in her private sanctuary of self, she had vaguely understood the idea of …
Cut the adverb, vaguely. Make a hole, Replace the verb had understood with stroked.
New sentence: Deep inside her mind, in her private sanctuary of self, she stroked the idea like a …
7. Go for Power in Your Prose.
When you rewrite to create the final draft, you combine the power of intuition—knowing from a hunch, a feeling, a spark along the spinal cord—with the disciplinary power of rules. In writing, there are rules for word order, for spelling, for pronoun reference, for verb tense. Sometimes when you’re writing hot, you can use rhythm to break a rule. Let’s say your sleuth is thinking, analyzing the case, and your page heats up, and your internal editor orders you to stop at the end of a sentence like a good girl/good boy only you keep going keeping on keeping on because you feel a different rhythm here and for the first time in a long time you feel the magical power of words: “And the face of the killer the white teeth like fangs slashing into meat into white bone and the cries of the victims the awful screams the rivers of blood and I run in my dream down a gray tunnel down a long metal tube lit with lights in little round cages welded to the ceiling and the tunnel leads to a yellow door and the door says Myra Jane in red letters dripping with blood and I throw open the door and …”
• • •
1. Reading.
To schedule feedback readings with your writing friends, scan the manuscript. Divide the manuscript, separating out the scenes and passages you want your friends to read. Schedule those readings now.
If you don’t want feedback from friends, set up a solitary reading schedule for the four sections of your story. Take a full weekend. On Saturday morning, for example, you read Act One. On Saturday afternoon, you read Act Two, first half. On Sunday morning, you read Act Two, second half. On Sunday afternoon, you read Act Three.
Take notes as you read. Mark scenes that need repair. Mark passages that you can cut.
a. Revise your list of scenes. Do a scene count. If you have fifty to sixty scenes, consider cutting scenes. One reason to cut a scene: it fails to advance the action of the plot.
b. Cut narrative summary. If you have converted the narrative summary into scenes, it should go quietly. If you still need the narrative summary, try to compress it.
c. Cut adverbs. Most adverbs end in -ly: terrifically, ponderously, enigmatically, logistically, administratively. Most are polysyllabic. A few are alliterative: listlessly, flawlessly, et cetera.
3. Rewriting.
When you rewrite a scene, start with a scene profile. Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes. When you rewrite the scene, start with dialogue. To sharpen your dialogue, connect the lines to objects in the setting—“Hand over the shotgun, dear”—and keep your lines short to get that one-two rhythm that sparks dramatic conflict:
• “Hand over the shotgun, dear.”
• “When you cough up, dearest.”
• “What do you mean, cough up?”
• “The IBM stock, dearest. Have you forgotten?”
When you rewrite a prose passage, remember to remove the adverbs. Then fill the hole left by the departed adverbs with physical detail: body parts, wardrobe items, objects in the setting, wounds, et cetera. Replace weak verbs like realize, think, feel, understand, et cetera with strong verbs that show action: slice, jerk, haul, prance, wedge, fire, snap, et cetera.
Keep the language simple by using subject-verb-object, a linear trajectory of 1–2–3: “X stroked the idea.” X is the subject. Stroked is the verb. Idea is the object. This same pattern of subject-verb-object still works when you hang a clause on the front of your sentence to make it more complex: “Deep inside her mind, in her private sanctuary of self, X stroked the idea.”
If you change X to a character’s name, the sentence takes on character: “Deep inside her mind, in her private sanctuary of self, Myra Jane Severance stroked the idea.” To enrich the sentence, add a comparison by using the word like: “Deep inside her mind, in her private sanctuary of self, Myra Jane Severance stroked the idea like a pair of felt-lined boots.” Because of the 1–2–3 word order and the verb borrowed from athletics (swimming, tennis), the center of the sentence stays solid. “Myra Jane stroked the idea.”
To transform the sentence further, change the noun idea to a more concrete noun like Ming vase: “Myra Jane stroked the Ming vase.” To use the sentence in a scene, change Ming vase to blade, and then hang a different clause on the front: “Smiling at the sleuth, Myra Jane stroked the blade.”
Have fun with your rewriting by transforming those sentences. Final draft is your chance to use the power of language to make your writing a memorable experience for your reader.