I just finished a novel. What do I do next? Revise & edit until it’s as good as you can make it on your own.

You’ve just finished a novel. Maybe you wrote it as part of November’s National Novel Writing Month. Either way, you’ve got this first draft happily sitting there and you’re wondering… what happens next?

First, let it sit. Then…

Edit and revise

If you’ve never edited a book before and aren’t sure where to start, I’ve got a road map for getting started here.

“…with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones.” -Edward Gorey

When people ask what editing is, I almost always answer this: Editing is making your book as good as you possibly can on your own. It’s going over every scene again and again, sometimes doing minor tweaks, sometimes overhauling huge sections until you reach the point when it either is exactly how you want it or you know you need outside help. It means completely rewriting some parts. It means cutting large sections, rearranging scenes, even changing the original plot… whatever it takes to turn that first draft into the best story possible.

I’m not going to lie… editing is a lot of work, usually more work than writing the first draft. But, in many ways, editing and revising can be even more fun and rewarding to a writer because that’s the stage when you actually make the book as amazing as you see it in your head. That’s the stage when you make your messy first draft into a sharp and polished draft you’d be proud to show to anyone.

Now, maybe you just wrote your book for fun and don’t have any plans for publication. I still think you need to go back and re-read your work and do some editing even just to clean up the typos. For starters, you may be surprised at the quality of what you wrote and that may change your plans. But even if you decide you still would rather this book never seen the light of day, it’s still helpful to your writing life to revisit what you wrote to see what you produced and to help you understand how to improve.

Once you’ve edited your book into literary gold (which, for the record, ALWAYS takes longer than you think it will) it’s time to take it to the next step…