Looking for the earlier posts? Click here for part one and click here for part two.

The last couple weeks we’ve been addressing the question, “How do you know if your book works as a whole?” Links for parts one and two are up above, but as a very brief summary, we started with identifying the core of your story by describing it in one sentence and building up from there. Then last week we talked about how important character motivation is to the cohesiveness of your story.

Another critical piece of identifying if your story works overall is to look at how you’ve structured it. I’m not going to talk about story structure because K. M. Weiland has fantastic resources on her website, which helped me out a ton last year when I could tell my book wasn’t working but I couldn’t identify why. Anything I would write on the subject would just be derivative of her series, so instead, here’s a link to her Secrets of Story Structure series.

For the final post in this series, we’re going to focus on steps we can take during the editing process to identify how our story works and how it doesn’t.

So, let’s say you’ve done everything we’ve discussed so far, and now you’re the proud owner of a complete first draft. Congratulations!

Now what?

Take time off

While nothing can give you perfectly clear perspective of your own novel, time away from it is the closest you can get. I like to take six weeks because it’s what Stephen King told me to do back when I was in high school and read On Writing for the first time. Six weeks has worked for me, as I talked about in this blog post: Six Reasons To Take Six Weeks Off From Your First Draft.

During my six weeks away from the manuscript, I do everything I can to not even think about it. If I have one of those, “Oh, shoot! I never tied up that loose end!” kind of realizations, I jot a note to myself on my calendar for whatever day I’ve scheduled to get my book back out. I never open the manuscript until it’s time to edit.

Another perk of time away is that not only will you be able to see your book more clearly, those words will feel less precious to you. If you get back in there and realize you need to cut a character or a chapter, you’re not going to feel it as keenly because you’re further removed from the work you put in to write those words.

I can’t stress enough how beneficial those six weeks are to my ability to pick out what works and what doesn’t in my books. Especially if I can get emotionally invested in another writing project, and I don’t even really want to pause my new book to edit my first draft.

Read as quickly as you can with a notebook in hand

This is the next step I take in evaluating how I did with my first draft.

I open the file on my computer or, even better, I send it to my Kindle. Reading on my Kindle, I can’t edit, and that’s what I want. I don’t want to be tempted to fix every vague word and misplaced modifier. The time for those corrections is after I’ve evaluated the story as a whole. If you spend energy up front fixing little issues like that, it’s akin to touching up the paint on your kitchen walls before ripping out the cabinets.

So what is worthwhile to look for in the first read?

1. Look for what IS working. Make notes of dialogue you like, scenes that land effectively, imagery you used well. Whatever it is that you like about the story, jot it down.
2. Anything that feels “off” to you. You are a reader with good instincts. If you come across anything in your manuscript that leaves you feeling like, “I’m just not sure that works…” put that on a list.
3. Things you know need to be fixed. For me this includes but isn’t limited to situations foreshadowed but never paid off, characters who are flat in the first part of the draft but complex later, plot holes that you could drive a semi-truck through. All of it goes on the list.
4. Research you need to do. This I keep on a completely separate list, and I put down big and little things.
5. Questions that need to be answered. Sometimes I have things that I just want to ponder. “Instead of reacting this way, how would the scene change if my character felt this emotion instead?”

Make a to-do list

After I’ve read my entire draft and made all my notes, the next thing I do is organize everything into a list. I arrange mine from biggest changes to smallest changes, and I include any research that needs to happen, prioritizing it by how much the answers impact the plot. Here’s what those first items on the list can look like:

• Evalina’s story line in the last 1/3 of the book doesn’t work. Come up with new story line for her and fix all scenes
• Cut Lorenzo.
• Research deployment and make changes to chapters 7, 15, 16, and 20.

And then toward the end of the list, there will be things like this:

• In chapter 4, fix placeholders and put in real street names.
• Research mens clothing in 1940s
• Look at menus for Italian restaurants in the 40s and make changes

Actually do the things on the list

Once the list is made, I start with those big things and work my way down.

Why not just start at chapter one and work through the book? I’ve found if I try to fix a story sequentially, that’s too much for me to try and hold in my head. Even though hopping around in the story gets messy, it works much better for me to edit from big to small.

Now read it again

Once I’ve crossed everything off my list, I read through the book again as a whole. Shannon put it best when she said at this stage of the book, she always finds “gangly appendages.”

Don’t despair if your book feels a bit Frankenstein-ish at this time. You’re going to fix that as you read. With this read-through, I do all the trimming, tucking, and tweaking that makes the story read pretty smoothly.

Time for critique partners?

Once upon a time, at this point in the process I would do another polish before letting critique partners read my book. Now I’m at the place with my writing friends where we understand that the prose isn’t necessarily super pretty yet. That we just need some feedback on the story as a whole.

Another perk of sending your book to your writing friends is that you get another break from the story. By the time they get their feedback to you, you’ll have better perspective when it comes to implementing or disregarding their suggestions.

Ready(ish) to take on the world!

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, there’s a chapter called “In Praise of Crooked Houses” that starts off:

I could sit down with you right now and go through each of my books, page by page, and tell you everything that’s wrong with them. This would make for an incredibly boring afternoon for both of us, but I could do it. I could show you everything that I elected not to fix, change, improve or fuss over . . . To save time, though, let me offer just one representative example.

Ms. Gilbert then goes on to talk about how in her most recent novel, there is an “unfortunately underdeveloped character.” And that she suspected as she wrote that she didn’t get the character quite right, but she was hoping to get away with it. But she gave the book to her early readers, and they all pointed out the character.

At this point, she had a choice to make. Fixing the character would’ve required an additional 50 to 70 pages, and the book was already over 700. And she was smart enough to know that everything touches in a novel. You can’t just pull a piece out, fix it, and pop it back in without having ripple effects.

I feared I might end up destroying a book that was already done, and was already good enough. It would be like a carpenter tearing down a finished house and completely starting over because he’d noticed–at the very end of the construction project–that the foundation was off by a few inches.

And do you know what happened when I released my admittedly imperfect book into the world? Not much.

She goes on to say that lots of people had lots of opinions about the book, and that a few critics commented on the underdeveloped character, but nobody seemed overly bothered by her.

We are never going to write perfect books. So really, at the end of it all, our question becomes, “Does my book work well enough as a whole?” As I talked about in this post, we have to embrace good enough or we’ll never get anything done.

Just for fun, what’s the funniest mistake or typo you’ve ever found in one of your stories?