Story Unboarded: Polish

This idea closely related to one of the issues I had with the subject of my previous IMHO entry. Fundamentally, I felt like the work lacked polish.

Polish, as an umbrella term, can encompass several things. One dimension is proofreading. You want to get rid of as many typos, weird sentence structures, and other anomalies before publishing. This should be done even for free content, such as this blog, as you are still attaching your name to it. It can be done to a lesser extent for less important content, sure, but it should still be done. You never know piece of content people will see first when forming a first impression of you as a creator, so all of it should be as high quality as possible.

But there is also the dimension of the actual story. Major plot holes are a sign that the story building itself didn’t receive much polish. The first draft will inevitably have problems, which is why you never publish a first draft as is. You must constantly examine and revise your plot until it makes sense to an outside observer. This is no easy task, and for most people the process requires a certain balancing act. In other words, you can’t simply offload this work to someone else. The more familiar someone is with the story, the more likely they are to just accept things within the story as reasonable, even if an uninitiated observer would not. It is ultimately the author’s responsibility to review the logic of their story, and use second opinions to help spot the inconsistencies they can’t see due to being too close to the project.

Finally, there is polish in formatting. I consider this completely separate from proofreading, as you can have an entirely grammatically correct story while still formatting it terribly. The two worst things I’ve seen on digital books are not using page breaks between chapters properly, so you get previous chapters bleeding over into the next, and not properly selecting the chapters. In the example I mentioned, they failed to select one of the chapters in one book, and in another they didn’t alter the table of contents to actually use the name of the chapters. That’s a completely avoidable limitation to the utility of the table of contents, since people are more likely to recognize the content of where they left of through the chapter name rather than remembering they were on Chapter 5 specifically. If they do remember the chapter, they also just as likely remember the page number, so the Table of Contents was unnecessary.

There is a lot more that could be said on this, but I don’t want to drone on too long. I think I’ve made my point. After all, part of polish is also knowing what to edit out of the final draft.