If speed is the key to completing your first draft, patience is key to perfecting your final draft. Editing will, and should, take time. This doesn’t mean editing needs to take a long time, it just means this is where you’re supposed to slow down, be thorough, and apply most of your effort.
Did you use a vague word when you could have used a more descriptive one? Did you use five words to describe something when you could’ve done it in two? Are your words in the correct order—the object before the action, for example? Are your images in the order that you want them to be visualized?
If you don’t comb through your work, methodically, and answer questions like these, this could be another reason your proposal might get rejected. Let me show you why.
Take these two sentences:
You probably began constructing a mental image as you read that first sentence. And when you read the second sentence, you then had to backtrack to correct the murder-mystery-style image you had created from the first one.
Do you see how having those sentences in that order would likely cause a reader to have a mental image hiccup?
This doesn’t mean your story, or book idea, is bad. But this is the kind of thing that can briefly pull the reader out of the experience and interrupt the flow of your story. The agent reading your work won’t necessarily be able to articulate why your story isn’t resonating with them, they’ll just sense that your writing is awkward.
Luckily, this is nothing that a little editing can’t fix.
By flipping the order of the imagery, and using slightly more descriptive words, you can make a much clearer visual, and therefore smoother reading experience.
There may be yet a better way to construct that sentence, but at least now the reader will see the imagery as intended. Simple edits like this can make all the difference in how your writing, your story, your book proposal will be received.
We don’t have the space here to go into the entire editing process—that could be an entire book to itself—but you can grab a copy of my editing checklist here.