After NaNoWriMo
OK, you did it! You kept your head down and your eye on the
ball, you stuck it out, you sweated and you (possibly) cried. But you got there! You finished the month and you finished the
book!
Congratulations! Well done!
You’re a winner!
………………………….
… Now what?
Well… it’s a first
draft in the most absolute possible sense of the word. There may be those among you who can write a
perfect book in a single draft without so much as changing a word along the
way.
I salute you!
I don’t know if
there are reliable statistics on how rare that would be, but I’m guessing that
90-95% of you still have work to do.
The dreaded
revision…
The friends with
suggestions…
The sudden doubts…
Me, I would let it
rest. Not too long… a week, perhaps
three. Then read it.
Make a decision… is
it something you really, really like?
Does it represent the best of you?
The chances are that it does. If
there’s one thing a marathon writing project does for a writer, it’s that it
burns away the dross. There’s no time to
doubt the original concept. There’s no
time to get bogged down in fiddling around with the characters. There’s no time to let the persnickety brain
take over from the gut.
This doesn’t
necessarily mean that it’s ready to submit.
Thirty-one days is not enough time for doing things like filling in an
essential piece of backstory that you didn’t know you’d need until page 76.
But if you know it’s
got that Something that makes a reader turn page after page after page, if your
confidence in it grows every time you read through it, if you’ve polished
everything you can find to polish…
…then it’s time to
find a beta reader.
NOT a family
member. NOT your best friend. It’s all very well to let them read the book,
but unless they’re writers, really good
writers, most of their comments will not be useful and some of them will piss
you off. (I showed the manuscript of The Falconer to three friends. One of them liked it, one of them didn’t have
any comments, and one of them tried to rewrite the first paragraph! A month later Random House bought it, unchanged.)
If you’ve got a
teacher who would read it, or a fellow-writer whom you know will give you good
feedback, that’s one way to go. And
there’s always the option of turning to someone who is, as I am, a professional
writer-editor, for comment, editing, beta-reading or any combination
thereof.
Who knows… maybe
you’ll join Sara Gruen, Erin Morganstern, Hugh Howey, Rainbow Rowell, and
Marissa Mayer, whose bestselling first novels all started with NaNoWriMo.
Above all, write
on!
