The Last Five Things to do Before You Submit Your Manuscript
THE LAST FIVE THINGS TO DO BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR BOOK
Okay, you’ve gone to the mat with your manuscript for months or years, and you’ve finally won the match with yourself. Your book gleams like a Rolls Royce. You’re throbbing with desire to submit it.
STOP! It needs more work.
Because words on a screen are harder to proofread than words on a page, because human beings are imperfect, because no manuscript any editor has ever seen is letter-perfect—for all those reasons and many more, yours needs a final sprucing up.
Writing books and mag articles and movies for half a century has taught me to TAKE FIVE LAST STEPS BEFORE SUBMITTING A MANUSCRIPT. Here they are:
• Read the entire manuscript again and beef up the verbs. The man didn’t “move” (one of the laziest words in the English language), he “glided,” or “strutted,” or “shuffled,” or “hustled.” The man and woman didn’t “argue,” they “clubbed each other with ugly names” or “slashed each other with knife-blade accusations.” Etc. You won’t find one page that can’t use a more graphic verb.
• Cut as many adverbs as you can. But don’t just cut them. Wrap the adverb’s meaning into a more active verb. Where you wrote, “The car moved slowly up the driveway,” change it to “The car inched up the driveway.” Where you wrote “She laughed loudly,” write “She hooted.” And so on. Combine your adverb and verb into a more vivid verb.
• Read the entire manuscript aloud to yourself. This is the most powerful of these suggestions. It’s an amazing experience. You’ll see places where the language is mundane but yearns to sing, or where it meanders along when it should deliver a short, hard punch. You’ll notice, especially, dialogue that is wordy—something like “I’m not going to put up with this” when “Screw you” would have done better. Or dialogue that is explanatory when you wanted an emotional flare-up.
You’ll also notice words that have been left out, or typed twice, or repeated too close together. You’ll spot awkward phrases and pronoun confusion. Read any manuscript out loud and flaws will become obvious.
• Transform narration into scene with dialogue. Read with a sharp eye for passages you’ve summarized instead making them into scenes. Easy example: Perhaps you wrote, “Leaving, she told him she’d be back in an hour.” Instead let the reader see and hear—“One hand on the doorknob and the other about to slosh her coffee on herself, she called out, ‘Sweetheart, I’ll be back in an hour.’”
• Last, spell-check the manuscript. Yes, damn well do it. Sure, spell-check is nuts. Its ideas about grammar are stiff and old-fashioned. It doesn’t understand the use of words like “myself” and “yourself” and even confuses “its” and “it’s” (!). But it does two things well. It catches repetitions (when you’ve typed “sky” twice instead of once), and it can spell (it knows “accommodate” has a double m). No matter how many crazy ideas Spell-check spews out, spotting the spelling errors and repeated words is worth it.
Five final steps—and now you can hunt down that million-dollar advance.
—Win Blevins
About Meredith and Win Blevins
I’d like to offer one more: Run the chapters or ms through a word frequency counter. Easily found for free online. I do chapter by chapter. Too often I find I have unknowingly attached myself to a word. Say, did I really want to use the word “inspire” in one chapter? Maybe I did for a reason. Often that’s not the case.
What a terrific idea! Didn’t know there was such a thing.
Win
Here is one I use http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp
I am certain there are other.
Thanks so much for the great source. We’re so happy to have you here, Joan.
Best — M & W
Win,
The way you punch up verbs and make dialogue that grabs the collar is refreshing- Bukowsky without the empty beer bottle.
Thanks
Yvon
Great comment, Yvon. You are spot on — love the analogy. You’re a writer, and that is definite.
Best — Win
Great tips !
Thanks! More to come — stay tuned.
Love it! Great post! Reading aloud has been my favorite writing tip.
Tia — We’re so happy to hear your words. Reading aloud, yes, if there’s a missing stair you’re going to trip over it when you hear your story. It makes editing take longer, but it makes it right!
All best to you — W & M
Thanks for the advice Meredith and Win. Good advice.
Stay with us Sumner. We’ve only just begun, and we have a load of writing tools for you.
Thank you for writing — M & W
I’ve been heading the opposite direction on the question of narrative vs. live scenes. I’ve been groaning for years about live scenes that are boring. Trivial dialogue stop the story cold. I’ve been seeing more bad storytelling than ever before, all because of the show, don’t tell, theology. At the same time, I’ve been looking at the reasons why Victorian and early twentieth century novels, from Joseph Conrad to Somerset Maugham, are so powerful, and it is largely because they are narrative and move the story along. I’m working toward novels that are largely narrative, and am delighted to say they are working better than the more faddish dialogue novels. And they give me vistas that don’t exist in dialogue, such as following an observed character. See Lord Jim. In 50,000 words of narrative I can tell more story than 100,000 words of “showing.”
Hey, Richard, Meredith here.
Win loves your comment, and he is chomping at the bit to give a response that is deserving of Richard Wheeler. (One of my favorite writers.)
Soon, Richard, and thanks so much for writing. — M
I’m very happy to have such a master novelist as Richard Wheeler join this dialogue. He has a lot to teach us all — agree or disagree with him, he knows his craft.
This seems to me fertile ground for a discussion that I’ll make the next mailing about these two of the most important of the fiction writer’s tools — narrative and scene. Everyone can judge for himself and decide what works best and when.
Thanks, Richard!