A 10-Point Checklist for Editing Your First Short Story

Finishing a first draft is a genuine achievement. It is also, inconveniently, only half the job. What separates a story that gets shortlisted from one that gets a polite rejection is rarely the idea — it's the editing. The good news is that editing isn't mysterious. It's a set of specific questions asked in a sensible order, until the answers stop making you wince. Work through the ten points below and you'll reach the end with something you can send out without flinching.

Points 1–3: Shape, Stakes and Structure

1. Does your opening start in the right place? Many first drafts begin one scene too early: the character waking, driving, remembering. Ask yourself what the first moment of change is, then start close to it. You can usually lose a paragraph, a page, sometimes two, and the story will sharpen rather than suffer.

2. Does the middle escalate, or just repeat? Write one sentence per scene describing what is different by the end of it. If three in a row read like "Maya worries about the letter", you have a problem. Something must be spent, lost, revealed or decided in every scene, and the cost should rise as you go.

3. Does the ending answer the question the story asked? Not resolve — answer. If the opening promises a reckoning, deliver one. If your final line shrugs, try deleting the last paragraph. First drafts often end twice, and the earlier ending is frequently the stronger of the two.

Points 4–5: Character and Point of View

4. Does your main character want something in every scene? Motivation needn't be noble or stated outright, but it must be visible. Readers will follow someone who is trying, even badly. Find the scenes where your protagonist is simply observing and give them a goal, however small: to get out of the room, to dodge a question, to be liked.

5. Whose story is it, and is it told from the right head? First person, close third, omniscient — each makes a contract with the reader. Test your point of view by asking whether your narrator could plausibly know every detail on the page. The sound of another character's heartbeat, the exact colour of a room the narrator has never entered: those are slips to fix.

Points 6–7: Tense, Time and Order

6. Is the tense consistent, and is it earning its keep? Past tense disappears on the page, which is why it's the default. Present tense adds immediacy and can thin out over several thousand words. Whichever you choose, hunt the wobbles, especially around flashbacks and any sentence leaning on "had".

7. Can a reader draw your timeline? Backstory and flashbacks are useful, but they need anchors. Give each move in time a sensory detail: fog on the window, the smell of the van. Then check the props. If the mug broke in scene three, it can't be sitting on the table in scene five.

Point 8: Make Your Dialogue Work Twice

Dialogue should do at least two jobs at once: reveal character, advance the plot, tighten tension, pass on information. A line managing only one is usually cuttable. The quickest checks:

• Cut the greetings. "Hello." "Hi, how are you?" "Fine, you?" is real life, not story.
• Let characters talk past each other. Real conversation is full of evasion, interruption and the wrong answer.
• Keep tags to "said" and "asked"; they're invisible. Let action beats carry tone — She put the knife down.
• Read the scene aloud. If you run out of breath or stumble over a clause, so will your reader.
• Swap the names. If you can't tell who's speaking, the voices aren't distinct enough yet.

Point 9: Tighten the Line

First drafts tend to run long by roughly a fifth. Not a rule, just a pattern worth testing. Look for:

• Filter words. "She saw", "he felt", "I realised" place a pane of glass between reader and scene. She saw the door open becomes The door opened.
• Adverbs propping up weak verbs. Walked quickly becomes hurried. Keep the ones doing work a verb can't.
• Repeated gestures. Three shrugs by page four is a tic, not a character trait. Vary or cut.
• Explanation after the fact. If the scene already showed it, delete the paragraph telling us what it meant.

Before: She was really nervous as she slowly opened the letter, and she felt her hands were shaking badly.

After: Her hands shook as she opened the letter.

Point 10: Proofread Like It's Going Public

Because it is. This is the pass where you stop improving and start cleaning up.

• Read aloud, or read backwards sentence by sentence. Both catch missing words and typos that silent reading skims past.
• Be consistent with the small things: UK or US spelling, single or double quotation marks, ellipses, dashes.
• Search for your own tics — "just", "suddenly", "very", "began to", "a little".
• Check names, ages, dates and places, and any factual detail you've used. Get it right or make it vague.
• Confirm the practical details: word count, scene breaks, title on the first page, no leftover notes to yourself.

Before You Send It Out

Read the whole story in one sitting, ideally the day after your final edit. You'll hear where your attention dips, and that's usually where a reader's will too.

Then read the guidelines properly. Word count, theme, deadline, formatting, whether simultaneous submissions are allowed. Magazines and competitions turn stories away on technicalities more often than writers like to believe, and a piece that ignores the rules rarely gets read on its merits.

Keep a clean copy, note where and when you sent it, and expect to wait. If it comes back, that isn't a verdict on you. It's one reader's answer on one afternoon. Revise what you now agree with, leave the rest alone, and send it somewhere else. The writers who get published are, more often than not, simply the ones who kept editing and kept sending.

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