THE END? NOT QUITE

Your fanfic masterpiece is finally finished. You just typed The End. Now it's ready for everyone out there in Internet-land to read!

Hit save and sit on those eager hands. Remember the list of important lessons I gave you back in the Writing Tutorials Introduction? Especially #4: Never submit or post a first draft ANYWHERE! Including the 'Net. What you just finished is the first draft. You need at least two more drafts before submitting or posting. So we're moving into Important Lesson #5: You WILL write more than one draft.

Please don't cry. You finished the first draft, go celebrate. Go out and eat, go reintroduce yourself to your family, basically find your life again. Enjoy the high. I only got to enjoy the high from finishing the first draft of "Domestic Bliss" for a couple of hours. Try to make it last a little longer for you.

Okay, you're back from celebrating and ready to work. Now, the next step is to put everything connected with this story out of sight for a while and start on the next project.

"But you said I had to make another draft!"

You do, but first you have to get some distance. Distance gives you objectivity and you must be objective to edit. Time shuts off your right side of your brain (or at least moves it to something new) and turns on your left side. Stop grumbling. You really are making things easier on yourself. How long to wait? Long enough so you're not constantly thinking about the story. Stephen King waits about six weeks. I doubt anyone reading this is that patient (myself included), so give yourself a deadline. My deadline was writing the next chapter in my crossover novel. Make sure there is a back-up copy of your first draft and put it away.

SPELL CHECK AND WORD COUNT

Pull the first draft back out once your deadline has passed. Editing and proofreading look daunting. The trick is to divide it into stages. Yeah, that means more than one read-through, yet it is easier when you're just concentrating on one thing. The first step is to run your story through a spell checker and a grammar checker. This doesn't solve all the draft's problems, but it does usually eliminate the most obvious misspellings (as long as it is not a correctly spelt typo), punctuation errors, and capitalization mistakes. Depending on the program's level of sophistication, it can point out potential grammar traps. Often the aids are more aggravation than they're worth, but for the mistakes they bring to your attention that you didn't consider are worth going through the hassle.

Both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect have these checkers built into them. But what if you've composed in a word processing program that doesn't? Or like me, went ahead and typed in all the HTML coding necessary for the finished product? Use whatever your program has available. If nothing, you're going to be doing another check for spelling errors. The method I've discovered--the only one that doesn't add extra coding to the document--for having the HTML coding is to save the document as text, brackets and all. I open the text version in Microsoft Word and proceed with the checks. Of course, the program flags everything with the tags as wrong, but that's why you have the "Ignore" button. I save the checked version as text and open it again in NotePad Plus, and save it as an HTML file. This depends on the version of Word, using this trick with Microsoft Word 2000 that I have at work shows the document as a browser would and adds the extra coding no matter if the document is a text file or not. Here is the first draft of the first page of "Domestic Bliss." I'll be using this page as a sample text throughout this tutorial.

The second step is to do a word count. Again Word Perfect and Microsoft Word have word counters built into them. But why count the words before really revising? Because all first drafts are wordy and you will trim a lot of unnecessary stuff. "2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%" is the formula Stephen King was given. "Even today," he says, "I will aim for a second draft length of thirty-six hundred [3600] words if the first draft of a story ran four thousand [4000]." (On Writing 222 - 223) Edgar Allan Poe's advice was that a short story be "brief enough to be read at one sitting" and "that anything not contributing to the total effect of the story be omitted." (quoted by Barbara Wernecke Durkin in "Cut, Carve, and Polish Your Story" in Handbook of Short Story Writing Vol. II 175) There is more room to play around in a novel, but why would you want to waste the reader's time? And without taking a word count before your cuts, you won't know if you’ve trimmed enough.

The word count for "Domestic Bliss" is 22,364, which anybody who has paid attention to word counts knows is novella length. And it's supposed to be a short story! I'm going to have to trim ruthlessly. For this first page, it is 593 words. I need to get it down to 534 if I follow the 10% formula.

For those who don't know, word count is the way fiction is divided: short story 1 - 7499; novelette 7500 - 14,999; novella 15,000 - 39,999; and novel 40,000 and more. Why does it matter? It's pointless to sell a novel-length manuscript to an editor who only buys short stories. And if all you're concerned with is fanfics, is it fair to promise your readers a novel and only deliver a short story? I want to cut the length of "Domestic Bliss" to at least a novelette. It's good practice if nothing else.

THE FIRST READ-THROUGH

The third step is your first read-through. Take your story and some paper for notes and read without stopping. You want to emulate the first-time reader as much as possible. Make notes of the problems as you spot them, and keep reading.

What should you be looking for? Any place where your writing faltered. Easier said than done, but it pays to be honest to yourself. Listen to that nagging voice in your head that says "Modo would never, ever, ever, do that." Don't decide that no one else will see the gaping plot hole. You found it. Mark any detail that needs double checking.

Hopefully, you won't find anything that requires a massive rewrite. A massive rewrite is when you're forced to toss out or add a subplot, add in one or more scenes, junk pages of material. Anything less than that is a minor revision.

MORE IN DEPTH

If no major rewrites are needed, then you are ready for the next step--multiple read-throughs concentrating one one thing at a time. You'll probably get annoyed with the slowness, but if you're unsure of your editing skills or have to divide the editing over several days, it will keep things straight. And the more editing you do, the better you will get at spotting errors in the first and second read-throughs.

And always flag a problem when you spot it. It doesn't matter what you're supposed to be looking for, you won't find that problem again when it's time to look for it.

Scenes

Are there any spots where you lose the drama of the story? Have you summed up when you need to show the action unfolding? Do you make scenes of events that don't deserve it?

Characters

Do you stop your story to introduce a character, telling the reader everything that has happened to her from birth to now? Are the characters behaving in character? And if they aren't, do you have adequate motivations for the deviations?

Point of View

Have you jumped out of one character's head and into another without adequate transition? How badly do you need that other viewpoint? Try the scene from the same character's viewpoint all the way through.

Dialogue

Read the dialogue out loud. Can you say the sentence without tripping up? Does something just sound wrong? Is the vocabulary correct for the speaking character? Have you broken up the dialogue with too many beats or too much interior monologue? Have you not added enough? DO you lose track of who says what?

Paragraphs and Repetitions

Does the speaker get to talk for pages without getting interrupted? Is the scene going on and on without a break> Are you rephrasing the same idea and you have no reason to emphasize the point?

Proportion

Have you included too much detail? Give the readers enough to visualize, but don't do all the work for them. Have you spent too much time on one character or one plot element never to have it play a part in the ending?

Grammar

Do all your sentences end with a period, question mark, or exclamation point? Is all the dialogue enclosed with quotation marks? Is your verb tense consistent?

Finishing Touches

Take count of your -ing and as phrases and -ly adverbs. Can you reword them or delete them all together? Does it strengthen the sentence? With sex scenes and profanity, less is more. How much do you have. Is it character appropriate? Do you break a key moment of your plot for a metaphor or flowery phrases? Have you deleted all the clichés and replaced the image with something original? Have you limited your use of italics and exclamation points to only where the emphasis is absolutely necessary? Are all the chapter titles formatted the same way?

CORRECTIONS

Don't get depressed about major errors. Hey, you discovered it first. You get to change it before anyone else sees it. Here is the corrected first draft of the first page.

Speaking of letting other people see a manuscript in progress, I don't recommend it until after the first draft is finished. Yes, I have ignored this advice now on two occasions. So why give it? Because if the people you show it to are any good at beta reading, they're immediately going to start pointing out what is good and what is bad with your unfinished story. The emphasis is taken off writing the story and moved to fixing it. You want to act on these comments after the first draft is finished.

The fifth step is to correct your story following the notes you took. The sixth step is to run it through the spell checkers and grammar checker again. Anytime you correct, typos can happen. You now have a second draft. Here is the second draft of the first page. Its word count is 529, under the needed projection!

There is one more step before sending the second draft to your beta readers, one I'm going to do with all my stories starting with "Domestic Bliss." The eighth step is to create a style sheet. The next tutorial goes over this tool in detail.

RECAP

Now for a quick recap. Here's a list of all the steps.

1. Spelling and grammar check with the computer.


2. Word count.


3. First read-through.
   
   
   
   • Getting an overview of how the story works.
   
   
   • Looking for any place where the writing falters.
   
   
   • Making notes of problems and of what you liked.
   
   


4. Multiple read-throughs, concentrating on one issue in a pass.
   
   
   
   • Scenes
   
   
   • Characters
   
   
   • Point of View
   
   
   • Dialogue
   
   
   • Paragraph Breaks and Repetition
   
   
   • Proportion
   
   
   • Grammar
   
   
   • Finishing Touches
   
   


5. Correct the story according to notes.


6. Spelling and grammar check with the computer.


7. Word count.


8. Create a style sheet.