WRITING & FINISHING A NOVEL #7

So we’ve made it to the final post in this series!

EDIT YOUR PREVIOUS DAY’S WORK BEFORE WRITING NEW MATERIAL

This might seem to be more important for cleaning up your novel, rather than reaching the day where you pound out the words THE END, but let me explain!

Editing your previous day’s work gives you several benefits.
1. By the time you finish your novel, you’ve actually completed your first round of edits. Trust me, this is valuable. I didn’t do this on my first full manuscript and it was a long slogging process of fixing all the misspelling, minor typos, and double-typed words. The worst part was I still had to do real editing after all that. By editing your previous day’s work, you handle the tedious process in manageable parcels.

2. You give yourself a chance to ease back into the writing stream. This editing time helps your brain reacquaint with the ideas you assembled the previous day and helps you start building forward momentum as you move into fresh material (a cup of coffee also helps!).

3. You will be encouraged to create more when you find those well-written gems tucked away within the manuscript. Don’t ignore them. Savor them for the victories that they are and keep writing. The more you write, the more frequently these treasures will find will start cropping up!

I would offer two minor words of caution.
1. Don’t spend so much time editing, that you neglect the writing process. If you don’t write, you won’t have words to edit the following day. Never allow any process that hampers your forward motion.

2. Don’t read your previous day’s work and beat yourself up because it’s not the most amazing prose ever composed. Keep in mind that you will be polishing and adjusting later. Right now you are only interested in the big picture.

Lastly, on a practical note, here are a couple of thoughts to help you on your way to completion.
1. Keep you final formatting goal in mind. If you plan to send your manuscript out to agents, start out with clean document properly formatted with 1" margins, 12 pt font, and a proper title page. If you're planning to publish on Kindle, format the chapter headers and put in the necessary page breaks. Getting the details right as you go will save you hours of tedious tweaking later.

2. Watch your punctuation and spacing. For the sake of visual clutter I don't recommend you keep it on all the time, but use the Formatting Symbols feature as you work will help you find the extra spacing and rogue formatting issues. Turn it off after you've done your verbal housekeeping.

 So there you have it seven tips for writing and finishing your novel.  

Click here to see Tip Number One.
Click here to see Tip Number Two.
Click here to see Tip Number Three.
Click here to see Tip Number Four.
Click here to see Tip Number Five.
Click here to see  Tip Number Six.

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