The following revision questions, which you may find useful once you’ve finished a full draft of your story, are extracted from Janet Burraway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft:

•    What is my story about? Another way of saying this is: What is the pattern of change? Once this pattern is clear, you can check your draft to make sure you’ve included all the crucial moments of discovery and decision. Is there a crisis action?

•    Are there irrelevant scenes? Remember that it is a common impulse to try to cover too much ground. Tell your story in the fewest possible sense; cut down on summary and unnecessary flashback. These dissipate energy and lead you to tell rather than show.

•    Why should the reader turn from the first page to the second? Is the language fresh? Are the characters alive? Does the first sentence, paragraph, page introduce real tension? If it doesn’t, you have probably begun at the wrong place. If you are unable to find a way to introduce tension on the first page, you may hve to doubt whether you have a story after all.

•    Is it original? Almost every writer thinks first, in some way or other, of the familiar, the usual, the given. This character is a stereotype, that emotin is too easy, that phrase is a cleche. First-draft laziness is inevitable, but it is also a way of being dishonest. A good writer will comb the work for clichés and labor to find the exact, the honest, and the fresh.

•    Is it clear? Although ambiguity and mystery provide some of our most profound pleasures in literature, beginning writers are often unable to distinguish between mystery and muddle, ambiguity and sloppiness. You may want your character to be rich with contradiction, but we still want to know whether that character is male or female, black or white, old or young. We need to be oriented on the simplest level of reality before we can share your imaginative world. Where are we? When are we? Who are they? How do things look? What time of day or night is it? What’s the weather? What’s happening?

•    Is it self-conscious? Probably the most famous piece of advice to the rewriter is William Faulkner’s “kill all your darlings.” When you are carried away with the purple of your prose, the music of your alliteration, the hilarity of your wit, the profundity of your insights, then the chances are that you are having a better time writing than the reader will have reading. No reader will forgive you, and no reader should. Just tell the story. The style will follow of itself if you just tell the story.

•    Where is it too long? Most of us, and event he best of us, write too long. We are so anxious to explain every nuance, cover every possible aspect of character, action, and setting that we forget the necessity of stringent selection. In fiction…we want sharpness, economy, and vivid, telling detail. More than necessary is too much. I have been helped in my own tendency to tell all by a friend who went through a copy of one of my novels, drawing a line through the last sentence of about every third paragraph. Then in the margin he wrote, again and again, “hit it, baby, and get out.” That’s good advice for anyone.

•    Where is it underdeveloped in character, imagery, theme? In any first, second, or third draft of a manuscript there are likely to be necessary passages sketched, skipped, or skeletal. What information is missing, what actions are incomplete, what motives obscure, what images inexact? Where does the action occur too abruptly so that it loses its emotional force?

•    Where is it too general? Originality, economy, and clarity can all be achieved through the judicious use of significant detail. Learn to spot general, vague, and fuzzy terms. Be suspicious of yourself anytime you see nouns like someone and everything, adjectives like huge and handsome, adverbs like very and really. Seek instead a particular thing, a particular size, an exact degree.

The ending of “The Graduate” starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancoft, is not happily ever after even though it ends with a wedding. Instead, it shows the idiocy and beauty of youth.

Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) wasn’t really in love with Elaine. He was looking for an escape from the dull existences of his parents and their friends. He needed something to go after. After all, what does a former track star do? He runs! And when his head isn’t right, he chases the wrong things when they don’t want him.

Neither Benjamin nor Elaine knew themselves yet and so they are bumping into each other…and then what? Benjamin smiles mischievously as he and Elaine ride in the backseat of the beaten up yellow bus. Elaine looks at Benjamin hopefully, but he doesn’t look back at her — this man-boy will NOT be looking after her and ensuring the safety of her future. Her expression is a mixture of worry and excitement.

The journey does not end at the end. The ending never is the end.