You’ve made it. It’s finally December and NaNoWriMo is over. You did it. Or you did something. It doesn’t matter whether you reached your goal or fell a bit short. Just because NaNoWriMo is done doesn’t mean you are. There are still many things left to do if you want to turn your words into something finished.
In the next three blogs, we will cover what lies ahead, from the initial steps through the final ones.
Keep Writing
While 50,000 words is an impressive feat, it does not fill an entire novel. Most novels run somewhere between 70,000-100,000 words or more for certain genres. This means you are short on words. So keep writing. Fill in the gaps. Finish the story.
Review
NaNo is great about getting words on the page, but the pace often causes issues with continuity and story. Review what you’ve written and assess what needs to be done to finish the first draft. Do you have gaps in your plot? Wonky character arcs? Missing research? No ending? Make a list and tackle each item on it. The goal now is to finish the first draft so you have something to edit.
Read It
Once the first draft is complete, you need to read it to see what works and what doesn’t. This is your precursor to editing. Don’t do anything in this step but read what you’ve written. You want to get a sense of the whole, which is tough if you are stopping every other page to edit.
Edit
This phase is multi-step. I’ve broken it down into whole book, story level, page level and sentence level changes and then offered some general advice about preparing the manuscript and getting ready to submit.
WHOLE BOOK:
Let It Rest
You need time to turn your writer brain off and activate your editor. You will be more effective after a couple of weeks to a month or more. Put your work aside and live. Dream up new ideas for projects. Focus on something else before you jump back into this project with editing in mind.
Read It
The best way to begin editing is to read your manuscript straight through. Don’t stop. Don’t edit. Mark pages with a flag for future reference, but that should be all you do. This first read-through is the best way to look at your book as a whole. You can’t do that if you are stopping every sentence to fix a word here or there. Like NaNoWriMo, this editing phase is quick. Push yourself so you can hold the entire story arc in your head and spot the problem areas.
Make Notes
Once you have completed your read-through, write notes about your first impressions. Did the plot make sense? Were your characters likable and interesting (or unlikeable but understandable)? Are there plot holes? Missing research? Write down all of your initial thoughts of the book as a whole. Set down a list of things you need to fix or flush out or clean up.
Read It Aloud
Once you’ve read it to yourself, try reading it out loud. This activates a different part of the brain and makes it easier to spot issues. Again, mark problem areas to come back to later. As an added bonus, reading aloud makes us slow down, which makes it easier to catch mistakes. It’s worth the time to take this step.
In this series, we will cover the entire editing process from first draft through preparing to sell your book. In the second blog, we’ll move on to story and page level edits. The third blog will focus on sentence level edits and general advice. And we’ll wrap up in part four with preparing your manuscript.