Once you’re satisfied that your story works as well as you want it to or, if you’re writing nonfiction, that you’ve made the strongest case you can, it’s time to dive into the next round of book editing.
Start by asking yourself whether your work grabs your reader from the start. You know as well as I do that if you fail to hook those fish, er readers, right away, they’ll swim off. So you can’t afford to indulge in a warm-up or to bury your lead. You have to catch their attention with your first sentence. Take a look at your favorite books and note how they start out. Make sure the opening of your work measures up.
Next, you need to make sure that all the pieces in your book are in the right place. I like to skim my manuscript at this stage. If I start reading closely, I’ll want to start editing. Dropping down to that level deprives me of the overview I need. By skimming the pages, I can remind myself of the content in each section of the book and make sure that the sequence works and that I haven’t left any holes.
Once you’ve ascertained that the large building blocks of your story or your argument are structurally sound, it’s time to work on flow so that your ideas connect. This is where the sloppy copy meets the road—the rules of the road that is. But don’t worry. The simplicity of writing’s basic rules will amaze you. So here we go.
Remember that each chapter makes a single argument. And each chapter needs to be linked one to the other. Think of a train. The locomotive provides the power that pulls the whole thing along. That’s your first chapter. Each car (or chapter) has its own content, which is linked to the car before it and the car after it. Those links are called transitions. The caboose (or conclusion) wraps the whole thing up.
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