Now For The Real Work

This is the phase most writers don't like, especially beginning writers who tend to impulsively send something off the minute they have finished it.
A word of advice: never get so full of yourself that you send out a manuscript that will get rejected because it is too bulky, too wordy, too sloppy and too full of errors - because this shows the editor that you were too lazy to go back and work on it.  This is a common mistake among first time authors.  Enjoy the high of having completed a book, pour yourself a well deserved glass of champagne, then take a few deep breaths and accept the fact that the real work comes next.

(And don't try to cheat.  It doesn't work.  A friend of mine was told by her editor that her novel needed to be trimmed by 30 pages.  So my friend went into her Microsoft Word set-up and widened the margins.  The page count went down, but she didn't fool her editor, who was not amused.)

Permit me to quote from James Michener, one of the greatest novelists of our time: "I have never thought of myself as a good writer.  Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts.  But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.  I find that three or four readings are required to comb out the clichés, line up pronouns with their antecedents, and insure agreement in number between subject and verbs.  My connectives, my clauses, my subsidiary phrases don't come naturally to me and I'm very prone to repetition of words; so I never even write an important letter in the first draft. I can never recall anything of mine that's ever been printed in less than three drafts.  You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out."

Wise words from a great writer.  So now that "This Golden Land" is a whopping 650 pages long, I will roll up my sleeves, seize my red pencil, and start cutting out at least half the adjectives and adverbs, delete words such as "almost, very, nearly, mostly, actually," and, aware of my own peculiar weaknesses, I know that I must seek out every "suddenly" and "all of a sudden" and delete as many as I can.  And when I come across a long descriptive section that seems boring to me, I will amputate it no matter how hard I had worked on it, because it will for certain be boring to the reader.  (Cutting out our written prose is very difficult to do.  It's your own creation, after all.  Here's a hint: don't toss out what you have deleted.  Save it for another story!)

And never rush this editing and polishing process.  You will only have to do it over again, and usually after someone has scowled.

See you next week with a report on my lowered page count!

Image Source: www.skeletonmethod.com