This is our final look through developmental book editor and guest blogger Laurel Cohn’s lens into how to navigate your next draft process once you’ve written your manuscript. In this five-part series on building resilience, creative writing Art of Writing tutor, Laurel, has taken us through:
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How do I know when I’m done? An excellent question and one that Laurel has dealt with a lot over the course of her long career as a structural book editor. Laurel and I will be running a special retreat in Florence from June 25-29 next year, on all these manuscript issues. There will be classes all morning on structure, then in the afternoon, both Laurel and I will work individually with writers in the gorgeous Palazzo San Niccolò lounge workspace. Next week’s blog will be The Next Draft program as details are finalised and will be up on the site over the coming days.
So how do we know when we have done all we can to get our ms up to agent or publisher query letter standards? Over to Laurel. And now, Part 5: How do I know when I’m done?
One of the questions that writers often ask is ‘How do I know when I’m done? How do I know when the manuscript is ready to send out to a publisher or agent?’ There’s no straight forward answer to this. The trajectory for each manuscript might be a little different. I certainly encourage writers to develop the manuscript as well and as far as they can. This will include multiple drafts, your own revision of the manuscript, perhaps two or three such revisions, occasional workshops/courses, giving it to others for feedback, getting an assessment, perhaps a second read-through by an assessor, and maybe a mentorship or fellowship. When you feel confident that you have addressed all the issues that you and others have identified as requiring attention, and you are feeling good about the work, then it is probably time to send it out.
Anne Lamott answers the question this way:
‘There’s an image I’ve heard people in recovery use – that getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed. I think this perfectly describes the process of solving various problems in your final draft. You get a bunch of the octopus’s arms neatly tucked under the covers – that is, you’ve come up with a plot, resolved the conflict between the two main characters, gotten the tone down pat – but two arms are still flailing around. Maybe the dialogue in the first half and the second half don’t match, or there is that one character who still seems one-dimensional. But you finally get those arms under the sheets, too, and are about to turn off the lights when another long sucking arm breaks free. ... but if you know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it’s the very best you can do for now – well? I think this means that you are done.’ (Bird by Bird 93-94)
Knowing when your work is ready to be launched into the wider world can be a difficult thing to pin down, a gut feeling. At the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2018, there was a fascinating panel about first novels. Someone in the audience asked the question: 'As first novelists, you want to put your best work forward and you are constantly revising what you have written, so, at what point do you let go and decide, okay, this is perfect and I can send it for people to see?' The Egyptian writer Omar Robert Hamilton answered it this way: 'At some point, if you go away from a text for a month and you come back and you look at it... for me, when it looks like I can't even remember how I did that, or like I wouldn't be able to do it again if I sat down to do it ... and if it seems beyond me at that point, then maybe it's done.'
Writer Dinty Moore employs a very practical measure for answering that question. He says, ‘If I can read it from the beginning to the end, out loud, to myself, and I don’t stumble on a sentence and go “Oh, oh, that’s awkward,” if it just reads well, if I hear it sounding complete, then that’s how I know.’ (‘Inside Flash Nonfiction’, Inside Writing podcast Dec 2020)
Writers sometimes give themselves a deadline to be done by. They say to me, ‘I have to get this finished by the end of the year, or by such and such a month.’ Writers who intend to self-publish have sometimes booked the printer and the launch before receiving any feedback. Deadlines can be helpful in terms of getting to the next point of the development phase, but finished? Maybe they will be, maybe they won't. My response is, to take a deep breath. Slow down. Give the work the space it needs to develop its full potential. You put so much of yourself into it, honour the process that is required for it to be the best it can be.
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If you’d like to share any comments or thoughts, I’d be happy to hear from you. Email me directly at lisacliffordwriter@gmail.com.