By Greta Boris //
New writers often ask me, “How do I know when I’m done?”
It’s a good question, one that reminds me of Goldie Locks and the Three Bears. Some send off their manuscripts well before they’re ready for outside eyes—too soft. Others play around and play around and never finish—too hard. How do you find that “just right” place?
Let’s start with the undone extreme.
When you’re starting out, you don’t know what you don’t know. Someone once told me that a number of famous, classic writers like Hemingway (it’s always Hemingway), or Twain, or fill in the famous-author-blank, sent their rough drafts off to their editors on restaurant napkins and scraps of notepaper. Amazingly, their editors were happy to interpret their genius.
Ah, no.
Manuscripts must be as clean as you can make them, formatted correctly, and follow sound story structure—at least these days. I learned an expensive lesson to the tune of $500 by sending off a manuscript that wasn’t ready.
We’ll be going into detail about revision in the upcoming months on The Author Wheel, but you can’t revise if you don’t finish. This post is about finishing. So . . .
Let’s talk about the never-done extremes.
Overworked – One day I called my dad on the phone. He’s been working on a book for quite a while. I asked him how his writing was going. He said, “Yesterday, I spent the morning getting rid of a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back.”
This is done. Stick a fork in it.
The never-ending story – For some reason this seems to happen to fantasy writers more than those of other genres. It looks like this:
Q – Hi, Wilhelmina Writer. How’s your novel coming along?
A – Great! I’m about 40,000 words in.
Three months later:
Q – How’s that book going?
A – Super, I’m 120,000 words and going strong!
One year later:
Q – You done with that story yet?
A – No, it just keeps growing. I’m at 250,000 words now, but I should be wrapping it up soon.
That’s a trilogy.
The chapter one loop – This is often a problem for writers planning to pitch to agents. They’re so concerned about the first 10 pages—which is a common submission length—they never move on to the rest of the story. It’s the equivalent of Ground Hog Day for writers.
Now that you know what too soft and too hard look like, what does “just right” look like?
This is a tricky question because books are art, and art is subjective. You can find writing coaches who will tell you diametrically opposed things on almost any topic, i.e. Oxford commas.
However, in the beginning of the year Megan and I promised you a series of posts about how we research, plan, plot, and write our work. Here’s what works for me. Try it on. Take what fits. Send the rest to Goodwill.
Following is a checklist of things that should be in a completed first draft in my humble opinion:
An appropriate word count: In our book and our online course, PUBLISH-Take Charge of Your Author Career, we have a section on how to research your chosen genre. You can read Megan’s blog post on how to research your genre here.
One of the things you should know before starting a book is approximately how many words it needs to be. For example, most thriller/suspense novels are between 75,000 and 90,000. Romance is generally shorter at 50,000 to 75,000. Epic Fantasy is the longest, often coming in at over 100,000 words.
If your work in progress is an epic and you think you’re done at 50,000 words, think again. Similarly, if you’re writing a mystery and approaching the 100,000-word mark, it might be time to wrap it up.
Tent-pole scenes: We cover this in our Fiction Plot Map workshop. Here’s a post on the topic. There are also a lot of good books about story structure. One of my favorites is Save the Cat Writes a Novel.
Whatever guide you use, make sure you’re hitting the primary structural points in the right places. Did you open with a hook? Did you jump into the meat of the story by about the 25-percent mark? Do you have a shift, or mirror moment in the middle of the book, a dark night of the soul somewhere toward the end, set pieces to delight your readers?
A satisfying ending: As writers, we sometimes fizzle after the big battle scene. After all, we’ve been writing our way to the exciting climax. When it comes, we’re often spent. Ask yourself, have you wrapped up all your loose ends?
Believable character arcs: Have your characters changed because of the events they experienced in the story? Can you verbalize that change? If not, those arcs may need some work.
Before you send it, read it.
Finally, before I send a manuscript off to anyone, I read it from beginning to end. First I compile it. Sometimes I make a Kindle file and read it in Kindle, sometimes I don’t. Either way, I don’t edit the manuscript as I’m reading. I want the experience to be as close to one a reader would have as possible.
I do keep a yellow pad and pen handy and make notes about the things that need work. Later, I’ll turn that into my revision list. However, I feel it’s important to shut off the editor brain, shut off the writer brain, and turn on the reader brain.
You probably became a writer because you’ve always been an avid reader. You know what you like and what you don’t, and I bet you can be pretty opinionated about somebody else’s work. Now’s the time to be truthful about your own. It’s less painful than hearing it from beta readers, editors, or worst of all, readers.
Megan and I are excited to begin sharing our revision processes. So if you’re not done with that manuscript—get ‘er done!
How do you gauge when to type “The End”? Let us know on our Facebook page, or shoot us an email.
Want more in this blog series? Visit https://authorwheel.com and take a free Author Personality Quiz while you’re there.
GRETA BORIS is the author of The 7 Deadly Sins. Ordinary women. Unexpected Evil. Taut psychological suspense that exposes the dark side of sunny Southern California. Her stories have been called atmospheric, twisty, and unputdownable. She lives in Mission Viejo and describes her work (and her life) as an O.C. housewife meets Dante’s Inferno. You can visit her at http://gretaboris.com.