Congratulations! If you’re reading this, odds are you are nearly done writing a 50,000-word book for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. During November, you’ve worked hard to write, on average, 1,667 words per day—no easy feat.
Once your draft is done, what then? You have a dizzying amount of options, and I feel your pain.
After successfully completing NaNoWriMo in 2001, 2005 and 2008, November 2011 was my fourth time taking on the challenge. My first NaNoWriMo book I’ll probably never touch again. The second I plan to develop as part of a travel fantasy series. I’m working on the third now, and it will be my first published novel. This fourth and latest book is a collection of travel fantasy short stories. I plan to take that to market first, with the novel following.
Writing over 200,000 words in a total of 120 days of madcap scribbling teaches you a few things. Let’s look beyond November, starting with one assumption:
You want to write and publish the best book you can. You went to all this trouble to write a book, not hand-craft bird cage liner.
As we come to a close on this year’s NaNoWriMo, these 7 tips will guide you and your book through December and beyond.
1. Step away from the Kindle upload.
It’s so easy. Cross the 50,000-word line, slap your Word document into the nearest Kindle uploader, and bam, in no time at all, you’re on Amazon!
But instead of “no time at all,” it’s really “way too soon.”
Just because you wrote a book in 30 days, doesn’t mean you’re ready to publish it on the thirty-first day. With all due respect to your muse and abilities, your book needs work. Odds are, lots of work, from tightening the plot to making sure your hero’s eye color stays consistent.
You can upload a better, stronger, tighter book—later.
2. Take a manuscript holiday.
In On Writing, Stephen King suggests that once you’ve finished writing a rough draft, put it out of your head. He’s right.
You’ve earned a manuscript holiday. Take a month, two if you need it, and forget about your book.
NaNoWriMo’s timing is perfect for this. With the approach of Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas shopping, and the December holidays, parties and family engagements, you have plenty to keep you busy. Let the holidays distract you.
Come the New Year, you’ll be ready to get to know your book again.
3. Set and review goals.
I know what you’re probably thinking. “That’s easy: I want to make lots of money off my bestseller. Duh.”
That’s great. Think big. But in order to achieve big, you’ve got to do small.
In order to do the small stuff that gets you to the big goal, you have to know what the little steps are.
Who do you want to read your book? What genre is it? What do you need to research for accuracy and verisimilitude? Do you need an agent? Are you trying to establish yourself as an eminent figure or expert in a certain field or genre?
Know your goals and tasks, and review your progress regularly. This is a big step to helping you meet those goals—maybe even that mythical realm of bestsellerdom.
4. Read it once as a reader, then a second time as a storyteller.
This is harder than it sounds. After writing the rough draft of my NaNo-written first novel, the toughest thing I’ve ever done was not mark up the manuscript. I read not as a writer and editor, but as a humble reader.
Doing this is important. When you step back from the book, you free yourself to absorb the story.
Your next read-through is with a critical eye. What works? What doesn’t work? What pulls you out of the story or makes you want to stop reading?
Here’s the hard truth: writing 50,000 words in 30 days is really cool, but it’s nothing but a good start.
Now the real work begins.
5. Rewrite, revise, repeat.
No matter what, rewrite and revise. Repeat as often as necessary. As I revise my novel, my goal is to catch and correct every problem in the story that I can find. Once you’ve fixed everything you can, you’re ready for the next step.
6. Give your baby to some beta readers.
Beta readers are a great way to improve your story, as long as they’re willing to kick your writerly butt.
Spouse, best friend, critique group, co-workers, whatever; they just have to give you an honest, constructive opinion. Make sure they know how much you appreciate their time. Explain that their opinions will help readers like them enjoy a final book that is the best it could be.
Remember, you don’t have to take their opinions as orders. Ultimately, it’s your book. If you disagree with a suggestion, know why you do and why you believe your way works better.
So far, beta readers have read the first 50 pages of my novel, and their feedback has been invaluable. My book is going to be all the better because of it, and I bet yours will be too.
7. Choose your course.
Do you want to work with an agent or publisher? Do you want to publish independently? The merits, drawbacks and methods of each are beyond the scope of this post, but the main thing is to know what you want to do and work towards it.
8. BONUS TIP! Celebrate.
By crossing the 50,000-word finish line by Nov. 30, you’ve done something most people never do: you wrote a book. You’ve proven to yourself that you can work to a deadline, while juggling the other duties, responsbilities and interests. Celebrate that accomplishment.
Now let’s put our heads down, and cross those finish lines. First, NaNoWriMo. Next, a revised, published book!
Anthony St. Clair has a lot of work to do on his novel and short story collection, both originally drafted during NaNoWriMo. See this year’s NaNoWriMo project here, or follow Anthony on Twitter @antsaint
Great advice, Anthony! Thanks for this.
Thank you, Anthony. Great advise. I’m printing this to remind myself of the value of not putting your work out there until it is done.
Steph
Thank you! I finished my first Horror novel, “The Dark Ones” yesterday and I’m back to writing the first Nanowrimo that I started this year. At 22,757 right now, I am going to have a good serious go at finishing both of them by the end of November.
I found this was the best way to handle finishing early – look away from the book, pour my mind into another one because I don’t want to lose any of my precious November writing time. Editing is such a completely different process. It’s a celebration. This book is a lot happier.
Thank you so much for Tip #7 especially. I have so many options right now. So many that I could go for all of them – but the one that goes to Kindle Upload or other ebook publishing is going to go through a dollar a page retired English teacher first who did a good professional job on an ebook I purchased.
There’s my final suggestion to add to yours.
If you do not use a publisher who pays you and puts your book past a professional editor, hire one. You will earn back every dime you pay her or him to polish it to professional quality. Your chances of a back-door submission, an Indie Success with loads of money leading to a pro contract offer zoom up by this.
You’re competing with authors who have had their work critiqued by editors who’ve been in the business for years. They love your book if they bought it. They picked it from all the many other good books that got that far. Something about it sang to them. They work on it the way you did… and they see into your blind spot with a skill as unique and creative as yours was to create it.
They will not wreck it.
If you hire them and you’re paying the bills, when you disagree they’ll have to come up with a way to make yours work.
We create diamonds.
Editors are diamondcutters. They will make it blaze. Your ideas, your characters, your concept, your best lines, the good stuff will all be there but sometimes the simplest change spotted by that expert eye will make all the difference in the world.
I sold a pro short story, comedy. It went to the editorial board after one suggestion. One simple one. “Cut it by a third, but don’t cut any of the funny bits.”
What had me giggling and grooving all through the writing turned into something that I could read aloud at a comedy night. It was on beat. It was so fast and silly and crazy that I was falling on the floor laughing when I read it again after the boil-down. I didn’t leave out one gag. Squishing them that much closer together, hunting down every unnecessary word, turned it from cheap wine into fine brandy.
So respect your editors. And if you go it alone, hire one. Otherwise you shoot yourself in the book. Heck, I’m not sure it doesn’t even help an author who is himself a professional editor for 20 years – but he’d know the value of having a different editor look into his blind spot.
If they bought it, they got it. Don’t fear artistic differences. If they wanted something else, they’d have bought something else – they had plenty of choices.
Oh and definitely go through your critique group first, because a pro editor is at his best the better it looks before it gets to him. That’s when he can see the fine points instead of spending hours hunting down all the normal rough-draft problems.