How To Write a Novel: The 5 Draft Method

Between Draft Preparedness - The Red Pen Edits

    The first thing you have to do before we begin the new draft is to get a physical copy of what we have already written. Print it out if you write on a computer. If you write in a spiral notebook, great, its already done. The second thing you have to do is get yourself a nice, bright, red pen, a cup of coffee, or a soda, or a water, or whatever, and a comfortable seat. We are going to be here a while.

    When you are settled and ready, open your book to page one and start reading. By the time you finish the first chapter, you will understand exactly why I made you take a week off. Because you wrote the words, you know the story, its been in your head and made it's way to paper. This is your baby. You love it, you know it, you live it. That week apart from it though, makes it a ton easier to read. You will notice errors that you wouldn't have a week ago, you notice things that don't sound right, sentences that just don't fit. Giving your brain that week off allowed it to reset, and although it still knows the story, it needs to remember the words. Self-editing is the single hardest thing to do, but the single most important thing you will ever do. Take it serious. Read the entire manuscript. From beginning to end. And then, read it again.

    The second time you read it, get your red pen out and mark out all the mistakes you found. If you know editing short hand that is great! It really helps. If you don't, don't worry about it. These red pen edits are for your eyes only anyway, as long as your marks and notes make sense to you, that's all that matters. If you don't know proofreading marks and want to know, there are a couple of good resources online, including: http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/writing-style-guide/copy-editing.shtml and http://webster.commnet.edu/writing/symbols.htm Just remember, it only has to make sense to you.

    Now, all you do is go through line by line, word by word and make your corrections. Each draft will get closer and closer to a perfect novel, right now, we are telling ourselves what exactly we need to change. However, understand this: this isn't just about adding a new paragraph or removing extra spacing between words. Use this time right now to make long notes in the margin. Where you need to add more details, how can this 5 sentence paragraph turn into an extra 4 pages of detail. This is crucial. During your editing phase with the pen, your goal is to correct any errors you see, yes, but more we are trying to add some flesh to our bare bones story. Sure, you may need to use the "new paragraph" symbol because you have one paragraph that's 3 pages long, so do it. But also read the words. Right now is when you need to start thinking about adding to your story. And by adding I mean some serious additions. Look at the attached image for this section to see some of my edits. You will get a better idea of how I do it. Once again, do what works best for you. Its all about comfort. However, before we can write our second draft we have to have something to write. So let's talk about word count for a moment.

    Page count technically means very, very little. However all counts for a manuscript are for editors and publishers. It's all about the money. You see, depending on the font size and paper height and width the publisher decides to use when printing the book, they can calculate how much to charge for the printing fees based on the number of pages it takes. This is all done by the word count.

    I can send in a manuscript with say, 100,000 words, and Bantam Press will turn it into a 350 page book, while Penguin Press may turn it into a 290 page book. It all depends on their publishing choices. So no one really goes by page count. I can tell you right now I have a 233 page book written out. However that is how many pages my writing software creates. I am using the standard font and width but I am only at about 68,000 words.

    I can make changes, but prefer to use Courier New font set at size 12, because Courier New is a standard width font. This means each letter takes up the same amount of space. A "w" and an "i" take the same page real estate. By doing this, I know that every page will contain right around 250 words. It is an industry standard. Now, as far as getting published, the publishing houses know, based on the genre of the book, about how well it will sell in that market, and about how long the average book of that genre should be. Based on this, there is a standard they look for within each genre. Horror, for example is allotted between 80,000 and 100,000 words per manuscript (Yes, Stephen King is exempt from this) Where Sci-fi is allotted 120,000 to 150,000. Supernatural Thrillers (such as Journal: Decoded) are allotted 75,000 to 90,000. So coming in somewhere in that range will offer me a better starting position when trying to get published.

    If I send in a manuscript with only 60,000 words, I won't even get looked at. Likewise if I submit one with 120,000 or more, it will get tossed aside. It all about industry standards and what they want to see. My personal goal is to have a complete and thorough story weighing in right around 85,000 words. However, I also want my story to be gripping, engaging and so enthralling you want to read it in one sitting. (which, from the rough draft test-reads, I was able to do already). So If I can manage that and come in anywhere over 80,000 words, I will be happy. So how many words do you need? Well its all based on what your book is as far as genre go.

     The best resource to go and look is found right here: http://www.literaryrejections.com/word-count/ find your genre and find your word count. This is what you are after for Draft 5 in my method, which we are a long way from. So for red pen edits on what will become Draft 2, think about how you can get closer to this number. If you are writing in a notebook for your first draft this will be a bit harder. You will have to do a basic guess based on how you write. If you write with small letters and in normal handwriting, usually you can fit 8 to 12 words per line. The best way to make an educated guess it to find a page that is full of words (meaning not many paragraphs or skipped lines) pick 6 random lines from this page and count the words in each line and take an average. So lets say you get nine words, ten words, ten words, 12 words and eight words. The average will be just shy of 10, so go with 10. Now, count how many lines you wrote on on that page, lets say its 25. Do the math, ten times 25 or... 250 word per page! Imagine that! Just like on the computer! Life can be so grand! If you are in this lucky group, now you just count how many pages you wrote on and multiply that by 250. You have an approximate word count. If you wrote on 120 pages then your approximate word count would be 30,000. And if you are writing a Young Adult novel then you have 20,000 to 50,000 more words to write. Basically you have to double the size of your current draft. No worries! We will get there!
   
    Now you see, though, why these marginal notes are so important. You can tell your self that this paragraph needs to be fleshed out to 3 pages and how to do it. Give back story on all the characters as they are introduced. You've read books before, you know how they are detailed. Not just what characters say, but how they say it, what they think and feel, what they are wearing what they see... you now get to go back and add it all in. Its exciting! And believe me, Draft 2 takes longer to write, but is actually more fun and easier to do so.

     So get in there and get mean with that red ink. It's okay! You are making yourself better. Make your corrections, fix those mistakes you find. Mark notes in the margin telling yourself things like "this paragraph should be a full page by itself" or "rewrite this sentence and add the street name" or "so we've met Ms. Handscombe, but we know nothing about her, change that!"  Just simple notes to remind you where and how to add flesh to this story. Go through your rough draft at least twice with the red pen (that's a total of at least three re-reads, counting the first read-through without any edits).

     Remember this process for editing (or just come back here for a refresher). You will be using this exact method of red pen editing after each draft you write. Get comfortable with it.

    Now that your red pen edits are done, you have corrections and additions and a million adjectives to write, its time to open up the computer and get to typing. I highly recommend you move to a computer for draft 2. If you can't, you can't. But eventually you will have to make your story digital, NOW is the best time (when you have the least amount of words to write, you see?).