I am at that delightful phase of writing known as polishing.

Oy.

I have a natural tendency to wordiness (no wisecracks allowed), so polishing for me doesn't consist of looking for errors, but looking for every opportunity to shave excess words.  I'm doing a "search and challenge" for all kinds of words that often occur in unnecessarily wordy expressions.  I spent at least a couple of weeks finding every occurrence of the verb "to be" in all its forms and asking myself if I could say the same thing with fewer words.

That little exercise alone resulted in a weight loss of 4000 words.

Oy.  Again.

Things like "it was then that he realized" can usually be rewritten "then he realized".  Now sometimes you really want that extra emphasis, and a few extra words can sound good if the preceding sentences were all very terse.  But not very often.  My rule of thumb when polishing is that the extra words had better add something real or they get cut.

Now I'm working on "could, should, would", which can sometimes be replaced with a simple past.  It's amazing how often "he could see" reads just as nicely as "he saw" or can even be cut altogether.  It's only when it's important to underline his ability to see what he is seeing that "he could see" is justified.  Ditto for "he could sense", "he could feel" and all their cousins.

And then I'm going to tackle adverbs and a host of words that I personally use too often. Hopefully as I mature as a writer, fewer of these expressions will make it into the first draft.  I sure hope so.  While seeing how my prose is tightening and getting crisper and clearer is gratifying, it still isn't anywhere near as much fun as cooking up the story in the first place.

I guess this is what they mean by craftmanship.  You writers out there, what do you look for in your "search and challenge" phase?  And for you readers, have you ever noticed things that the author should have worked on?  I realize that good craftmanship is pretty well invisible, making everything seem effortless and fluid, but trust me, effortless requires a lot of work.