You type “The End” and click save on your manuscript. You’ve just finished your novel. Maybe it’s even your first ever novel.
Maybe you express yourself with a satisfied grin, a whoop-out-loud cheer, or perhaps you heave a sigh of relief.
But what comes next?
Step #1: Take your novel as far as you can before getting feedback.
Before you are ready to send your manuscript off to the editor, before you start writing queries, and even before you ask your beta readers for feedback, you want to take your novel as far as you can yourself, so that your team of helpers can focus on the things you can’t see on your own. You want your feedback to be as constructive and helpful as possible in order to take your writing to the next level. You don’t want to backtrack and fix things you could easily have corrected on your own. And you want your novel to be better than okay; you want it to be great.
This part may not apply if you are taking a writing workshop, working with a writing coach, using alpha readers, or if you are part of a critique group where you share your works in progress during the earliest stages. In these scenarios, where the story is still in the building and growing phase, it is appropriate to share unedited or partially edited scenes, chapters, outlines, or ideas. This process can be invaluable and leads to lots of help in growing your writing skills, but this article is focused on what to do once you have a completed first draft.
But once you have that raw first draft written ,this is still a crucial next step. To summarize, fix everything you can on your own. Then get help from others to aid you as you correct things that fall into your blind spots.
I love the phrase, You don’t know what you don’t know. And it’s true. Your team of helpers will invariably discover things in your writing that you never knew existed, and this will help you out immeasurably. But in order for your readers to find these things, you have to clear out the clutter first. If your readers have to slog through a bunch of easy-to-fix or obvious errors, they won’t have the mental space left over to find the hidden genius of your scenes or point out subtle plot holes you’ve overlooked. You want to get the most out of your readers so you can take your writing as far as possible.
Step #2: Take a beat and celebrate.
First of all, let your novel sit and breathe for a bit. Put it away and do something else for a while. How long you wait before starting the editing phase will vary from person to person, but you need time to let go of it. Why?
First, you need to process what you’ve done. You have created an entire novel out of nothing but your imagination and hard work. You need to enjoy it for a while before diving back in. If you don’t stop and breathe, you might lose the passion that took you through the first draft. Taking space will give you a chance to keep your creativity flowing and keep that spark going.
But beyond that, if you try to edit too soon, you simply won’t see your mistakes. Sure, you might be able to fix the grammar and punctuation a bit, but you’ll miss subtle character signals, themes, or symbolism, and those things are just as important to the story, if not more. By taking a bit of time, you can return to the project with a fresh perspective and you’ll see things you wouldn’t have otherwise.
So let it sit. Let you unconscious mind process the story for you or a while. It may not seem like you are making progress during this time, but believe me, you are. Don’t skip this step.
If you have the itch to write and you want to take advantage of the momentum you’ve built up, you can start outlining your next project, start researching maps for a new setting for your next story, or draw pictures of future characters. You can still write and be creative, but leave this manuscript alone. At least for a bit.
Step #3: Start with the big stuff.
Okay, so you are ready to jump back into your manuscript again. Maybe it has been days, or weeks or months. Whatever you need to take. But now that you’re ready, where do you begin?
For most manuscripts, it helps to start with the big picture stuff first. Why?
If you start at the scene and sentence level, there are two potential problems:
- You end up polishing sentences, but you miss glaring plot holes or inconsistencies in your manuscript.
- You end up making unnecessary corrections, because you end up cutting lines, scenes, or even entire chapters, and you could have saved yourself a ton of time and effort.
Look at the overall story for plot holes and inconsistencies, look at your conflict to make sure the story continues its forward momentum, cut scenes (or mark them somehow) if they aren’t working, make sure your characters are telling the story you want them too, and make sure your minor story arcs are not left hanging and that they are necessary for the story to work.
These are just a few of the things to look for, and you can come up with a personal list or worksheet for yourself and use it for every novel you write to save yourself time.
This step is hard for a lot of people, but it’s especially hard for perfectionists who want to fix things as they go. So how do you train yourself to let the little things slide in order to focus on the big stuff?
Here are some ideas based on things that I do:
Print the novel out on paper.
It’s easier to ignore typos if you have to take an extra step of transferring corrections into the computer later on. You can write notes in a notebook or type notes into a separate document.
Cut out scenes that aren’t moving the story along.
Save them in a separate file and keep backups, though, just in case you want to add the scene back in or move it to a better place in the novel. Don’t keep a scene just because it’s pretty. It has to also add to the story. And sometimes, these cut scenes can be used as short stories, reader magnets, or may even lead to other novels.
Open the document in an ereader, tablet, or phone.
Just like the previous option, making small corrections is too tedious so you are more likely to focus on the story or plot. As a bonus, you can take your mobile device on the go and read while you are doing errands.
Don’t nitpick at this stage.
Focus on the basics of the story. Look for plot issues or other major things that need to be repaired before fixing paragraphs or sentences. Don’t get bogged down in the details or minutiae at this stage. You want to get through this in a timely manner, so you can use your time to rebuild any of the places that need major work.
Take careful notes.
It’s easy to have an epiphany, but then forget it when you sit down to make the corrections later.
Step #4: Go back to the drawing board.
Don’t panic if the story feels all wrong after this pass. You have deconstructed it a bit perhaps, but now you get to rebuild it and make it stronger than before.
Take a deep breath, grab your notes, and if you need to, go back to your outline. For writers, the outline is the drawing board. What’s did you say? You didn’t use an outline? Ah, if that’s the case, then you might be a pantser (someone who creates as they write). Or maybe you have an outline, but it bears little resemblance to the novel now that it’s written. Or maybe the outline is what led you astray in the first place.
Not a problem. Because you can still do this stage just as easily. You don’t need anything fancy. Some of you probably can do this in your head or with only a few notes rather a fully developed outline, and that’s fine. Some of you might need to create something more organized or detailed, and that’s fine, too. And every novel you write might need something different.
The aspects of this step that you will need are a strong sense of the main storyline, the minor story arcs, and character arcs, and the themes. You can jot these down with a couple of sentences or create a master document to refer back to over and over. The idea is to separate the strands of the story and analyze each one to see if it works.
For example:
You have the main story arc of two protagonists who meet and fall in love in a classic romance arc. But you also have a minor story arc about two minor characters who also meet and fall in love. Maybe you separate this minor arc from the main story and realize that their entire courtship happens in three chapters and looking at it critically, you decide that it has derailed the main story arc by creating an imbalance and overshadowing the scenes leading up to the climax. Now that you know, you can move these scenes and spread them out for a better story composition and overall balance.
Step#5: Middle stage stuff.
This is where you start getting critical about thinks like POV, psychic distance, motifs, analogies, symbolism, and foreshadowing, and much more.
For editors, this might fall under the category of line editing, because the focus is on use of language, paragraph and sentence flow, word choice, symbolism, and basically all the stuff that makes your writing beautiful and poignant. You might clean up some of the grammar and punctuation at this stage, but your main goal is to really take your writing to the next level. If you have the budget for an editor, that’s great, but many indie writers are working on a limited budget, especially if it’s their first attempt at publishing. If that’s the case, you’ll want to do as much work as you can on this stage, because this is the stage that takes just okay writing and turns it into great writing.
At this stage, if you are still new to writing fiction, I can be useful to invest time in reading books on the craft of writing. You can also research blogs or articles to learn what you can about things like filter words, using adjectives or adverbs in writing, dialogue tags, and all the small things that really help you writing to come together and shine.
Here’s a helpful exercise, if you are struggling with this stage:
Pull a section of a chapter or scene out and paste it into a separate document. From here, start analyzing the scene away from the main context. Now you can experiment without fear that you might mess up the flow of your novel. While you do this, look for things like filter words or action that is too passive.
Ask youself if you can “see” your characters interacting. Are they just disembodied, talking heads, or can you “see” them having the conversation in your mind’s eye?
Are your characters engaging the reader with their movement and body language or is every verb a variation of looked, stood, or sat?
Does the scene have a purpose, such as to explain something, drive a conflict, delve into characterization?
Step #6: Late stage stuff.
Give you book a thorough cleanup and polish up the language. Do your most professional work here, because you want readers to see how much you respect your work. Let them know you take your writing seriously and then they will too.
This is where you do your final checks. Clean up the typos and punctuation and take care of any final questions you have left over from the previous revisions passes. For this stage, it might help to find a different way to look at the manuscript. Often by this revision pass, a writer is too close to the work to see those tiny errors. The eyes start to play tricks. Or the brain does.
Here are some ways to review your manuscript to help those typos and errors reveal themselves:
Use a text-to-speech software or app read the words out loud to you.
This may come free with your word processor or tablet. Having the story read out loud will help you find missing punctuation or spelling errors that the eyes can miss. It might help you see ways that readers might interpret pace or tone differently from what you intended.
Print the manuscript out and read a hard copy.
You can play with page size and formatting and change up the font. Using a different font can help your eyes see the letters differently and therefore reveal hidden errors.
Read the novel out loud.
This will help you find alliteration or tongue twisters.
Have a trusted friend read out loud to you.
This might be tedious for an entire novel, but if you have a troublesome paragraph, this will help you see that way readers will interpret things like comma placement.
Use tools.
Let spell check help you out. This article isn’t focused on tools, but there are lots of them out there like PerfectIt or Grammarly. Some focus only on spelling, while others can help with grammar and punctuation. Note that these things are not perfect by any means, but using tools along with you own judgement can make your job easier.
Step #7: Final stage a.k.a. sending your baby into the world.
Now that you have finished the self-editing stage, you are ready to let others help you with the next leg of your journey.
Choose your team carefully.
This step will be different for every writer. Some people work with copyeditors or proofreaders. Some will start looking for agents. And many others will seek out beta readers. Whichever path you choose, always make sure to surround yourself with people you can trust to give you honest feedback. If you can rely on the team around you, then you’ll be well on your way to writing your best story. You can learn a lot from others on this journey, so keep an open mind. Use the advice that works and gracefully reject the advice that doesn’t work. But most of all, just keep writing and putting in the work and you will get where you need to be.
Happy writing!
If you liked this article, don’t forget to share it with your writer friends or subscribe to get more articles like this one!
[mc4wp_form id=”962″]
