First Draft, First Look© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
You've finished the book, and you have the overwhelming
urge, upon typing the last words, to immediately print the thing
and send it out in the mail. (At least I do. By the time I finish
my books, they feel like houseguests who have way overstayed their
welcome. I want them out the door yesterday.)
Take ten slow breaths, say your mantra, hit your
thumb with a hammer---do whatever you have to do to put the brakes
on. Don't send the book out yet. You have things to do to it before
your editor ever sees it. Go ahead and print out a draft copy. Get
out a notebook and a pen. Start reading through from the beginning.
If you find typos, fix them of course, but you're looking for more
than typos. What you're doing now is a continuity check. Make sure
that your days and hours track---that if a full moon hung high in
the sky at the opening of the scene (meaning the time was right
around midnight) you don't have the grandfather clock tolling six.
Or that your hero's eyes don't go from brown to blue halfway through
the book. Or that you haven't left a scene with little markers in
it that you were going to go back and fix when you figured out what
happened there, without ever going back to fix them. (I've found
whole sections like this in books I've thought were finished, and
I've been ever so grateful that I took the time to go through the
manuscript before I sent it out.)
Also look for clumsiness in the writing itself and
places where you used almost, but not quite, the word you intended.
Check for places where you spelled a character's name in different
ways, and so on. By going over the manuscript as carefully as you
can after completion of the first draft, you'll make sure that what
your editor reads is what you sent, and not what you think you sent.
There can be a world of difference between the two.
Deadline Concerns >>
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