Getting Published - 2. After you finish your manuscript

Last week in Getting Published - 1. Finish your Novel, I suggested that the first thing you need to do as a writer is finish your manuscript.

So now you’ve finished. You can send it off to an agent, right?

Wrong.

First, you take a few days holiday from writing after you type "The End" -  a week ideally. Do something completely different - go out with your friends, take a trip, go shopping. For that week or few days, have fun and do anything except think or talk about your book. You’ve got a lot more work to do and you need to come back to the manuscript with fresh eyes and renewed energy.

When the week is over, you are a new person, rested, relaxed and tanned from your days outdoors away from your computer. Now, you need to go over the text again and make sure that it is the best that you can get it to be.

To you, the manuscript is your baby. It’s unique and perfect. You’ve lived it day and night. You’ve sweated blood over it. To you, your baby is brilliant - who would not love it?

To an agent or an editor or a professional reader that they employ to sift through unsolicited manuscripts (the "slush pile"), it’s just another one out of the many hundreds, even thousands, of would-be books that they see every year.

Here’s the challenge for this part of the journey to getting your book published. Imagine you are this professional reader. You’ve been doing this for years, reading through "slush piles" of hopeful manuscripts. You come into the office and you’ve just done a huge pile of no-good ones. And you have another pile to go. And another. And another. The writing is mediocre and cliched. Or its over-written and turgid and difficult to understand. The typescripts are messy and they give you a headache to read. There are lots of spelling mistakes and typos and grammatical errors and that just drives you crazy. You’re fed up and tired and jaded. Wouldn’t it be nice, you think, to come across one manuscript that I could read for more than the first few pages, that would really excite me, that could actually be worth taking through the long publication process?

With this picture in mind, your mission now is to go through that manuscript and make it THE one that is going to give that professional reader their "Oh my God!" moment.

Here are some pointers:

• Check for typos, inconsistencies and spelling mistakes. A simple enough way not to irritate that professional reader. And it shows that you are a professional yourself.
• Does your manuscript look good? Is it clear and easy to read? Or does it give the reader a headache and blurred vision? The standard requirement is that the text should be double-spaced and on one side of the page only. And the font should be easy to read. I find that 1.5 spacing works just as well. I use Times New Roman font at 12 point. You can use any other preferred font but it’s best to avoid Comic Sans Serif and any of the more fancy, decorated ones.
• Ruthlessly purge your text of cliches and lazy writing. For example: "Her heart skipped a beat." Is there a fresher way of describing her shock or fear at that moment? Or You’ve called the butler Alfred because that’s the butler’s name in Batman - can you think of another name?
• Ruthlessly purge your text of purple prose. Does that sentence there really have to be so beautiful and lyrical? Does it have to be sooooo long? Do you have to have so many adjectives and adverbs? Does that word have to have so many syllables - will a simpler one do the job just as well?
• What is the point of a particular scene? What are you trying to say in it? Are you successful in getting that point across? Can you get it across a lot sooner than 4 pages into the scene? Is there stuff getting in the way of the point - can you simplify?
• "Don’t tell, Show." ie don’t tell your reader something, show it to them. For example, "He was nervous before the interview" versus "He paced the corridor outside the interview room and lit his second cigarette. His first still lay smoking in the ashtray. His hands felt cold and clammy." Are you doing too much explaining/ telling and not enough showing? 

The last four bullet points creep into creative writing class territory and there are probably other ways that you can tighten, hone and perfect your manuscript. For me, these are the guidelines I use whenever I re-read something I’ve written in my novels. You may have other techniques that work for your writing - if you do, it would be great if you could share them with me and the other writer-readers of this blog, so please do add a comment or email me.

I know by now you are chaffing at the bit to put that manuscript into its envelope and send it off to an agent. But not yet. The take-home message of this post is: You’ve only got one chance at getting this manuscript noticed and you want every submission you make to count - whether you work with the tips I’ve mentioned or use your own strategies to make your manuscript the best it can be.

But It can be difficult to edit your own work. One way to get help with this is to join a writing group or go to a creative
writing class or form a writers circle with other writers you know. Others can read your work with new eyes and through pooling writing experience, you can get feedback on how to solve a plot or style problem you’re not happy with or improve the way that you’ve written a scene.

So, next week - 3. Giving and Receiving Feedback: how to make the most out of a creative writing class/ writing group.

pic from flickr by penumbra; non-commercial use only; no derivations