Are you Worried about how to Finish your Novel? Here’s a Tip…
This month’s special guest Nicola May has wise words for anyone worried about finishing their novel…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: How do you know when you’re done?
NICOLA: Again, as a writer, do we ever know we’re done? It does annoy me, and I’m going to say this out loud: writers who procrastinate for bloody years over their manuscript, though. I do think get it down, get it to an editor, because what’s the point? Six years, going over this thing. What? It might not even be good enough. So that’s another bit of my advice. But, once I get to about 70,000 words — because my books are 75 to 80,000 words — I’m so happy to get to the end, thay I think, ‘Right, that should do. For now. The editor can look, then come back.’
MARK: And what do you do once you’ve finished that first draft? Do you sort of step away from it for a particular period of time, or are you straight back into editing mode?
NICOLA: Straight back into editing. To be honest, I’m a bit of a One-trick-Tina. My first draft is actually usually pretty good,
MARK: Right
NICOLA: Yeah.
MARK: Nice.
NICOLA: Don’t get me wrong. No, there’s been quite a few edits for ‘How Do I Tell You? — which I’ll hold up here. Here it is — That have made it much better by the editing team. So I’m not like, oh my God, there’s no edits at all. Of course there are.
MARK: Yeah.
NICOLA: It hasn’t had to be pulled apart.
MARK: So yeah. So a good sense of structure essentially is (important).
NICOLA: Yeah, I think so.
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