Alma T. C. Boykin
How many of us are blessed with the gift to instantly see what needs to be corrected after we finish a manuscript?
Yeah. I’m not either.
My habit is to finish the rough-rough draft. Then a day later I go in and fix the last little stuff that I realized I needed three hours after declaring everything done. Then it sits. And sits. The longer the manuscript, the longer I ignore it, up to a month or two. Sometimes, life makes a virtue of necessity. If I finish something in mid-November? It’s sitting until after December 26. Concerts, faith-activities, Day Job, family, all of those will come first. Ditto the weeks around western Easter. And major concerts.
Nota Bene: When I say “edit,” I mean typo hunting, adding details, making sure that the tall, red-headed man in chapter four isn’t suddenly a medium-height, swarthy man in chapter six, and that motivations make sense. This is not major structural editing, or huge revisions. Those are what might come (and sometimes do come) after Alpha and Beta readers or a professional editor goes through the work. This is me, not you. Some people do make major changes, or adjust things at this stage. YMMV.
I have heard that there are some authors who can write a draft, take a day or two off, then turn around and find all the flaws. They clean up the copy and send it off to be set in print, already perfect. Shelby Foote was one like that, although because he did his drafts in longhand, he may have caught problems far earlier, so they never even reached the page. Which might not count. Other than him, I have only heard rumors of these legendary authors, sort of like rumors of unicorns or the 40 foot long (or is it 80 foot long?) catfish that lives in one of the regional lakes. Their minds work in a different way from mine, although their “clean” manuscript might still benefit from a copy-edit or minor style edit.
Sarah and others have repeated over and over “don’t edit as you write. No. Write, then go back and edit.” I can’t do that, usually because just after I quit for the day, my hind-brain taps me on the shoulder and points out things that need to be adjusted, or things that the characters would or would not do. So first thing the next writing day, I go back and tweak those, clean out misspellings that are obvious, and re-read what I did the day before. Then I resume writing. Is that editing, or just getting into the flow of the work again? Both? Since “editing” implies a focused search for problems, continuity breaks, and flaws, tidying up and improving story logic might not count.
Editing as you write seems to lead to paralysis by analysis. You try to perfect and clean up, redoing this and rewording that, and make almost no progress. The flavor of the story disappears. Note that there are some people who can do this without the down-side. Others never get anything finished because they are so intent on perfection before completion. Other people make a separate list of “things to fix/add/clarify” as they go. I’ve never tried that, and I’m not sure it would fit my style. I do make notes at the end of each “active” section, but my hind-brain usually coughs up needed fixes after I’m done for the day. If using separate notes works for you, go for it!
What works for me is to finish the draft, then set it aside. Ignore it, work on something else, catch up on honey-dos, take a few days and get away from the keyboard, whatever you need to do. Obviously, if you are on a tight deadline, you might not have this luxury. Then I’d still suggest getting away from the work for as long as possible, just to refresh and recharge your brain. Then come back and try to read with fresh eyes. You will find flaws. You will find “what was I trying to say here?” or “No, he wouldn’t do that without a really good reason. I’d better add that reason,” and so on. Some stories are better than others. Some problems are more obvious than others.
So, what comes next? You don’t have to be as methodical as this author (I don’t have the space to dedicate to a place to pin pages to the wall!). But notice her observation on point number 2 – Write, the edit. And after sitting for a while, she found all sorts of surprises.
At this point, I send the story to a professional editor [Hi, Nas!] or alpha and beta readers. Again, wait. If you find things during this pause, make a note but don’t touch, yet. What you thing is a flaw might be something your outside readers like. Or they might also flag it. Patience.
Image Credit: Napoli Bread from Pixabay.
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Let Rest for Two weeks, then Stir”
One tip for finding typos and copy-edit stuff is to change the font. A change from proportional to monospace (or vice versa) will often make such glitchen stand out even to the author. If the change also changes to or from serif’d, the effect may be even stronger.
Also, if you can do it, side-load the draft onto an e-reader. Different font, different pagination and format, all those help shift the mind. Working from last chapter forward is also good for plain typo hunting, although it doesn’t help find continuity problems.
Each morning I start by rereading the previous day’s (or 2-3 day’s) work. I catch silly errors that way, and get into the flow of moving forward.
But I do endorse the “wait” at the end before the hard-core re-read (and ideally starting work on the next-in-series in the meantime). You know what you meant to write, and that gets in the way of seeing what you actually did write.. So — different font sizes (anything that shifts where the line-ends fall) and sometimes a mechanical edit-review tool that calls out duplicated words which can be astonishingly difficult to notice when you read in a hurry.
I do reread my own stuff after publication, and I’m not above collecting fixes to trivial typos and periodically silently refreshing the published edition (and any bundle it’s in). I won’t change anything else silently — that would be a new edition.
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Exactly. I once found a missing word — 6 months after I posted the chapter. Never noticed it before, because I knew what the sentence was supposed to say.
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“I am still human. Of course I can lie. Unlike you, I choose not to.”
And the odds are good your readers didn’t notice either. 🙂 They gloss over omissions more easily than actual typos.
It depends on how hard I outlined, I guess. Spider Star had, and the current WIPs have, a vague checklist of things that need to happen, not necessarily with a clear order, so there’s a lot of feeling my way cautiously forward, and backtracking to set up something I need to happen. Recent example: I wrote a scene where the male lead originally made a solo Dramatic Exit, and then realized the female lead needed to come with, so I started a new scene with both of them and then went back to the old scene to expand it. Like TXRed, I feel like any tweaks I thought of need to be added when I think of them, or else risk losing them.
Current annoying fanfic plot bunny maps pretty closely to the source movie that inspired it, but with a now-widowed woman from the prequel movie taking up the mantle of heroine, so I don’t anticipate a ton of backtracking.
I’ve backtracked for that sort of thing, too.
Also to avoid writing the next scene, on account of finding it difficult.
This.
I’m at the point in book 3 where things are starting to diverge wildly from how ‘our’ WW2 went, and I keep dithering over how far I can go without making it totally implausible or ‘Texas saves the world’.
For me, it’s usually that it’s a fraught scene, or else requires some of my weaker skills.
This also.
My way to catch thing that have gone right (and wrong) in my stories is to finish them, then put the complete story in a different format (I usually write in Google Docs, doing individual chapters. Then I do the final assembly in Microsoft Word). This is also when I do the rough layout (chapters and such).
I run the Microsoft spelling and grammar checker. It doesn’t catch everything, but it discovers quite a bit and that’s helped catch some of my more “head on desk” errors.
Then, I read the novel backwards. I start from the last page and work my way up to the first page. Why? Because it makes you think about what you’re reading. Doing that let me catch one big nasty plot error in The Winter Solist, and hopefully fix it…
Finally, give it a week, get the cover on, fire up Kindle Create, publish, enjoy the thirty minutes that is the state of grace where you realize that you’ve finished something…and get started on the next one.
On the article you linked to, it seemed to me that the writer had some very good ideas and some very bad ones. I, too, lack the space to pin the story to the wall, and I’m honestly not sure what would be gained if I did. She talks about “being able to see everything at once”–but surely, no matter how many pages are posted on the wall, you can only read one at a time, can’t you? On the other hand, I feel a need to print out the entire thing and do my initial edits on a hard copy, so I’m probably not in any position to criticize.
Tips 6 and 7 struck me as troublesome, though. Setting hard deadlines for myself is necessary, but I don’t have so many people crying out to beta read and edit my work that I can set hard deadlines for them. I’m afraid that if I said, “And I must get this back in a month,” mostly what would happen would be that I’d get the response, “Sorry, I don’t think I can do that. Maybe get someone else to help.”
As for #7, “Keep going over your manuscript until you’re satisfied with it,” yeah, no. If I did that, publication date would be approximately the 6th of Never in the Year Do We Even Have A Number That Big.
I fully agree on number 7. You can polish something to death, and not just “stripping out every hint of style” polish, either.
I do ask my outside readers to get back to me within a loose time-frame, but I write short. That makes a big difference. Asking someone to have an 80K word document back in a month or so is usually reasonable, assuming that there’s not a holiday or other huge event in the middle of that. A 250K word document? Very different story. When I’ve outside read, I’ve warned people up front that “I will do what I can before X” if there was a hard time constraint (like leaving the country, or Day Job events).
Sigh… each of us has a ‘different’ way of writing/editing/proofing… I do know what I meant to write, and the problem is, the reader DOESN’T know that. I can’t edit my own work, because I read right over errors (see above). I use both alpha and beta readers, and ‘edit’ based on their inputs before I send it to the actual editor. And yes, roofpreading works…sometimes… One thing I do is collect errors readers point out and go back and fix those after I get a decent group of them.
Readers: “So, how does [plot-critical thing] work?”
Author: “Like this, and then that, and then other thing there.”
Readers: “Why didn’t you tell us?”
Author: “Oops.”
Exactly!!! Sigh…
I put it on the backburner and write something else.
Yes, you have to remember to circle back to it, but the lone advantage of jumping between projects is that you can smooth out the mental effect of ends and beginnings.
I try to make my last draft done at a canter to ensure I do not forget the details of the first chapter while revising the last. This can be interesting for doorstops.