Hello everyone and welcome back! I'm going to write out my post today with a high level of patience as I work to not throw my laptop across the room! (yay...!) I'm glad everyone has stopped by again. You may have noticed the posts are a little bit earlier, that is because work has moved my schedule to start an hour earlier, so here I am!
Today I wanted to talk to you more about what to do once your 'finished' with something. I put finished in quotes because you're not actually done with the piece of work. If you were, the next step would be to a) throw it towards the sea of agents or b) go for self publishing, which means I wouldn't have nearly enough to talk about. No, I'm talking about when draft one is completed, and what steps should be taken.
Now you're probably saying that the answer is easy, and that your first step is editing. Actually, while editing will need to happen, the first step is actually much simpler. The first still is actually just reading. If you're anything like me, you can be about 2/3 of the way through your story and you are convinced it is terrible, or confusing, or full of so many plot holes you couldn't hold something solid with it. It's exactly because of this feeling that before you do anything else, you should just read the story. Sure you can fix little typos you see here and there, but this isn't for major editing, this is simply to make sure things make sense, and if nothing else see if you still believe what you were feeling about it before.
I went through this recently, and I was pleasantly surprised. Now it's also important to take a little time to pretend the story doesn't exist once you're done, that way when you come back and look at it your mind is a bit clearer. If you start reading it the day after you finish up the writing portion you're going to be so burned out you're going to have the urge to throw it in a fire. I suggest taking at the very least two weeks before reading it again, but of course don't wait too long, because there's risk of you never looking at it again if you do that.
The way I handled this was that I started working on the story that comes after the one that was finished, then after getting relatively far in it (and needing to give my wrist a little break) I decided to distract myself by reading the first story. Now admittedly this all happened at work, but it was a nice way to pass the time, and I found the story more enjoyable after I had pretended it didn't exist for a while.
I hope this advice has helped you out some. Just remember that in the end, what's most important is that you don't melt your brain, but that you're also trying to get your work out into the world. If you wait too long to get the editing process started, you might forget about the story entirely. I'm not suggesting that you leave it sitting around for months, but however long is necessary for your brain to recover and for yourself to be ready to put more work into the story.
I look forward to seeing everyone back here on Friday! I'll be back with my normal review and hope to show you all something you'll enjoy. Until then, I hope you all have a great rest of your week!
No comments:
Post a Comment