The Critical Importance of a Final Checklist
When you think your draft is done, it’s time to get methodical
When I finish writing a story, upon tapping that final period, my right hand will often fly to the sky in a celebratory flourish of finality. Woo-hoo! The story is done! Ready for takeoff!
Yeah, no.
Done is not done, I’ve learned the hard way.
See, there’s a method to this madness of writing, and a key element of the methodology is what you do after you think you’re done. If you’ve been reading the Writer’s Guide lately, you might’ve seen this post: Writing is 70% Creativity, 80% Hard work, and 90% Methodology. Having a final checklist is a key part of the methodology part. This is where you avoid embarrassment and, most important, separate your superb stories from the slop that floods the interwebs.
Life or death
A brief digression to illustrate the point: Recently I told the harrowing tale of what happened one time several decades ago when I was taking flying lessons. On a long-distance solo flight over unfamiliar mountainous terrain with bad weather brewing, I committed a cardinal sin of piloting: I rushed to takeoff on the final leg of the journey and inadvertently forgot to do one of the important final items on the written checklist: Setting the heading indicator so you know which direction you’re heading. The result of this and other mental mistakes were part of a terrifying journey that, for a while, I thought would be the end of me.
While writing nonfiction articles isn’t always life or death—though it can be, if you screw up a health story, for example, and somebody ODs on meth because you wrote that it can be good for you, instead of typing it can never be good for you—a final checklist can save a tremendous amount of embarrassment at the least, maybe even help avoid the sort of mistake that can kill a career.
Sure, I’ve made my share of embarrassing mistakes as a writer. But over the years, I’ve developed a final checklist that I run through to minimize errors, confusing passages or other stuff nobody has time for. The checklist is indispensable when self-publishing, but just as important when I’m filing to an editor. I don’t like to disappoint editors or aggravate them for no reason.
In the haste of writing a draft, I know that I can be sloppy. My writing is often a harried affair, as I rush to get thoughts out of my head and through my fingers before I forget them. Sometimes it all turns out fine, but often the result is a total mess. Once slop gets into a draft—a misspelled name, overuse of a crutch word, thick jargon, incoherent descriptions, excess baggage, whatever—the writer is apt not to notice it. And so I’ve learned that stories that are done are not really done. That’s why we have the word drafts.
It’s not what you think
You might think you know the drill: After the draft is finalized, the work of self-editing begins. Spell check, cut out the fat, reframe and rearrange and refine until voillà!, you’re done. I’m not talking about that stage, however. Like you, I do all the routine self-editing before I allow my right hand its flying final flourish.
I’m talking about what I do after I’m done with the draft.
I call it the final checklist.
Post-writing, working with a done draft, I have a standard checklist of things to do before I file or publish. I used to have them written down, a literal list I would refer to. But I’ve been tolerating my sloppy writing for about four decades now, so the list is ingrained in my head. I never call a story truly done done without doing these things.
You need a list, too. Trust me. I edit stories every day in which writers leave the same ol’ shortcomings and foibles in the drafts they file. If I didn’t know who filed what, I could tell you the authors of some of these stories simply by the obvious recurring oopsies.
Your list should be based on the stuff you know you tend to flub, or that your editor(s) tell you that you frequently flub. Maybe you often forget to include a good nutgraph, or your subheads are usually boring labels, or you tend to end your stories with summaries (nobody needs a summary of a well-crafted article they just read). Your list may not look like my list, but if you don’t know what should be on your list, feel free to steal mine.
Related: How to End a Story
My final checklist
First, I spell check. Then, my favorite self-editing trick: I walk away. I don't look at the story for an hour or a day—as long as I can tolerate. Then I review it—often in more than one pass—with these questions and instructions in mind. I examine each element with fresh, focused attention.
Is the hed really snappy? Would I read that story? Would anyone?
Does the subtitle fully complement the hed, or do I repeat myself?
Is the lede clear, concise and compelling? Can it be shorter in any way? Is there even one single word I can nix without losing meaning?
Those are the obvious checklist items. Start there in creating yours. Now, here are some more which, in my experience as an editor, a lot of writers would benefit from:
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