You’ve completed the first draft of your book. Congratulations! Time to celebrate before you get back to work.
Work?
That’s right. Even though you may be feeling pressed to get your book out, a whole lot more work is required after the first draft. Here’s a look at what lies ahead from now until publication. Fasten your seatbelt.
The Next Step
Let’s start with your manuscript. Up until now, you’ve been doing a lot of developmental editing—big picture stuff. You’ve bashed out your pages. You may have even cut material, rewritten passages, and added new material. The next step (after doing a basic spell and grammar check to clean things up) involves reading the latest version to check whether it hangs together, whether you feel that you’ve gotten rid of all the extraneous material, and whether it’s complete. While you can bring in someone like your writing coach to also do a read-through at this point, this is something you must do. You (or we) will also check how the story flows, whether it lags, and whether it’s consistent and clear.
Note: You won’t want to involve any other readers until you feel that story is right, and you’ve worked on language.
Show Don’t Tell
Your next step after the first draft is revamping your book’s significant scenes so they move from narrative to action. While this may take some time, it’s critical. According to Wikipedia, “show, don’t tell is a technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author’s exposition, summarization, and description. It avoids adjectives describing the author’s analysis, but instead describes the scene in such a way that the reader can draw his or her own conclusions.” The objective is to bring the scene to life instead of just giving the reader information. Even though we talk about story-telling, when it comes to writing, we should call it story-showing.
Even once you finish this transformation of your manuscript, plenty more editing and publishing adventures lie ahead. That’s why this is a six-part series, so tune in next week.
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