The second draft

Do not revise the first page for a month while the last page does not exist. Finish, if you can, then leave the manuscript alone long enough that you can hear it as a stranger. A weekend is the minimum. A fortnight is better.

Read it through once without rewriting, and note only the large fractures: a motivation that changes without a cause, a character who vanishes, a middle in which the want goes slack, an ending that belongs to a different book. Fix those before you polish a sentence. Beautiful sentences in a broken structure are the most expensive kind of waste.

Then make passes with a single question each time. Does every scene change something? Does this person still sound like themselves? Have you told us what you have already shown? Is the backstory arriving too early? One question per pass keeps you from tinkering at random.

Cut more than you add. Repetition is usually fear — the fear that the reader missed it. Trust them. Afterwards, if you want a mechanical look at tics and repeated words, do it on your own machine and then use your ear. A program can count. Only you can tell whether the repetition was a flaw or a refrain.