[stylist] How could I improve this story?

[Chris Kuell]

Barbara,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's hard for me to believe you 
did your best work if you never revised. I'm sure you did good work, but 
everything is improved with a little polish.

Revising your own work is often much harder than revising someone else's 
work, which is why I've tried to encourage people on this list to read 
critically and comment on peoples writing. It can help the writer, and it 
helps the critiquer to develop editing/revising skills. If you are really 
stuck in the revising process, perhaps you should try to 'fix' a piece of 
someone else's writing. It will help put you into the mindset of reading 
carefully and thinking--how can I make this better?

As for your book, I think you could try either strategy--either a complete 
re-write, or massive revision. It's hard to say what will work best, as 
everyone is different. If it were me, I think I'd try the complete rewrite 
approach. I say this because the biggest problem I saw with your book was 
plausibility. If it were tense changes or bad dialogue, those are easy to 
fix. But plausibility requires new scenes, large scale changes, which I 
think would be easier by starting from scratch.

Try it and see what happens.

chris