You haven’t had much time to work on your rough draft, but I’m going to go ahead with Step 7 – Read Each Chapter Again. If you’re not finished with your rough draft, please don’t stop working and jump to this step….keep writing and don’t skip to this step until you’ve got a complete rough draft.
Get out your copies (or open the files) and read each chapter as if you were reading it for the first time. At this point it may help to read them in order since not every writer will write chapters in the order they will appear in the book….and sometimes you find as you read that what you thought would be chapter 7 should really be chapter 5 for the story to flow.
As you read, jot down ideas and make notes of any glaring inconsistencies in story line. Fill in information that may have been missing from the first draft, such as your back story, character building paragraphs, and setting descriptions. Again, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about grammar, punctuation, or even spelling….right now we’re just perfecting the story.
Many writers find that it helps them to print out each chapter, leaving a wide margin on one side of the page so that they can make notes in the margin. You may prefer to read from your computer screen and make changes as you go. When you make changes on the computer, whether you’ve made paper copies of your notes or not, save your changes to a new file name. I simply add the numeral “2″ to the end of the file name for the second draft, “3″ to the third draft, etc. so that I can tell which version came first and if I decide a paragraph I wrote early in the process is better than one written later, I still have a copy of it.
And finally, don’t worry about catching every mistake. You will read it again (and again) before you are ready for final proofreading. One word of caution, though….now that you have a complete draft, you may be tempted to set it aside and let it marinate for a while before pulling it back out. That’s not really a writing technique, that’s procrastination. If you are unhappy with any part (or all) of the story, keep working on it.
For this job as in any other, if it was easy, everyone would do it….and I know that in this age of blogging and social networking web pages, it may appear that everyone is writing, but how many are writing well AND publishing? Do your homework and write your pages. Proof and edit your pages until you have written the best possible piece you can write BEFORE you start shopping for an agent or a publisher.
As always, I will close with a note that I love to hear from you so leave comments….If you have a page, please include a site address so we can visit your blog, too.
