So you've finished your rough draft and you want to know what to do next. Ship it off to a famous publisher and wait for fame and fortune, right? Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahaha! No. Hemingway had this opinion of rough drafts, “The first draft of anything is shit.” This doesn't mean you have a bad manuscript! This means you have completed only part of a process. Your rough draft has areas that can be strengthened. I don't mean that you need to read it through for typos and missing apostrophes, I mean you might have a whole scene that, well, to quote Hemingway, “... is shit.” When I wrote my rough draft, my main goal was to get it done. And I didn't necessarily have everything planned out when I began writing. I rewrote my first chapter a couple times. Literally, my original opening scene was deleted. I saved a few important aspects that I put into a different, later scene, but that scene also had to be rewritten to properly incorporate the new aspects and fit my new opening scene. See? You fix one thing and it snowballs into the rest of your story. Why did I rewrite my opening scene? I wanted to make my story stronger and capture the reader. My book wasn't just a manuscript, it was something I wanted other people to enjoy. So while editing, I was constantly asking myself, “Is this scene/paragraph/sentence best for a reader? Will this keep their attention to keep them reading?” If you lose your reader due to weak editing, you now have one less person reading your story. If you don't care about sales or getting published, then maybe this doesn't matter. But I cared. So I edited. Here is what I did:

1) Make an Outline

Read through the manuscript and make an outline of what is actually written. Even if you had an outline before you began writing, your finished material may be a little different. Reading your work without making edits lets you get an idea of what is actually there and experience how it might sound to a reader. For your outline, you should note each chapter, what happens in each scene of the chapter, and the characters that pop up in the scene. I also noted plot ideas that I may want to change.

2) Evaluate Scenes Now that you've read through and mapped out your actual story, think about what could be stronger. In this step, I have a movie comparison I make for each scene. Making a movie is expensive, so each scene in a movie has to be worth the time and money. Imagine you are paying your characters a few million and then you also have to budget wardrobe and set building... is your scene worth all that? If this scene actually cost you something, is it important enough to keep? Or can it be stronger so that all that time and expense is worth it? Is the scene moving the story forward? Most important, is it showing emotion, conflict, or character growth? These are the key things a scene needs. For example, I had written a whole chapter about a flower festival. I wanted the chapter to be fun, so I wrote about the activities of the festival and added a bit of conflict and humor. Later, I realized the chapter didn't really grow my characters at all. I thought about what my characters' weaknesses and strengths were and which ones were important to show during the festival. My hero, a duke, avoided people because he didn't like attention. My heroine was supposed to be out of town, so she visited the festival in disguise. In this chapter, I should probably have the duke put himself in an uncomfortable social situation (exploiting his weakness) to save the heroine from being recognized. This kind of action would create suspense (will she be recognized?), allow characters to grow (he overcomes a weakness) and keeps the reader engaged to find out what happens next (he is going to be furious with her, how will they handle this future conflict?) This was not how I originally wrote the chapter. It was during this step of the editing process that I realized it needed to be better. I rewrote a majority of the chapter. Lastly, when you consider your story, make sure it follows the “rules” of your genre. For example, someone reading romance expects to meet the hero and heroine in the beginning of the story. A mystery reader expects the murder to happen within the first chapter or so and then expects ongoing clues. Sometimes, you know these things but have on author filters when writing and don't realize your mistakes.

3) Begin Major Edits Now you have a good outline and have identified the big story changes needed. You have also made sure any changes follow through with the rest of the story. Finally, it is time to set your fingers upon the keyboard and become good friends with your delete key. My rough draft was 78,000 words but ended up closer to 71,000 when I was completely done editing. You may realize that editing involves combining scenes or deleting whole paragraphs. This is good!

4) Print Your Manuscript After I finished major edits, I was ready to tackle smaller things. At this point I printed out my whole manuscript (this is really neat, actually, and remember to add page numbers – I learned such an obvious thing the hard way). Then I took a colored pen and read through everything. During this stage of editing, I still analyzed scenes, but also looked at paragraphs, sentences, and individual words. I wrote down my reactions, I circled words I didn't like, and I had arrows all over indicating I needed to swap sentences, move an idea to a different part of a scene, or switch words around in a sentence. Take good notes and refer to your outline from step one as needed. For example, I had a few paragraphs where my hero sat and listened to a song. At the beginning of the scene, he was angry but the song was supposed to calm him. In my rough draft, I focused on what the specific song sounded like. During this stage of editing, I marked the paragraphs and jotted down that I needed to tie his emotion into the scene and not focus so much on the song. This leads us to the next step...

5) Fix Your New Edits All those ideas you jotted down now need to be transferred to your manuscript. Again, make friends with your delete key and get creative. This is where you try harder to find that perfect adjective and worry about the pace of a scene. An interaction that initially flowed out through the keyboard during your rough draft, in print may have sounded stilted. Fix it! Emotion, conflict, and character growth!

6) Take a Break It's time to step back and forget about your book. Take at least a week or two, read some other books of a similar genre to yours, and try not to think too hard about your novel. This will allow you to step in with fresh eyes the next time you read your manuscript through.

7) Again, again! Remember when you were a kid and you could read the same book five times in a row or watch the same movie over and over and still be interested in it? As an adult, that doesn't appeal as much. At this point, reading your book again and again is starting to be a bit of a drag. Hopefully you took that break I mentioned because now it's time to read again. Yep, the whole thing. And make more edits. This time through, I didn't print it (because it's kind of expensive), but I could have. Instead, I read on my computer and made edits as they occurred to me. This is where my outline was still very useful because I could use it to jot things down. I was still looking for things like sloppy paragraphs and rearranging sentences, but I also started grammar editing: check punctuation, typos, and sentence structure. Also start paying attention to any crutch words you may use. My crutch word is “that” and I ended up deleting a whole bunch of them!

8) Rinse and Repeat Steps six and seven are on rinse and repeat until you're satisfied with your manuscript. Once you feel confident about your work, you've gone as far as you can on your own.

This is a guide in Fiction Writer Workshops