When is your book ready?

Or, how long is a piece of string?

Last week I came across this advice from Mike Nappa from Nappaland Literary Agency on how you need to write your book four times. He has written over 50 books, so I guess he knows what he's talking about... (I have paraphrased his comments - please see his full article here.

1. The Close-In Writing: You write a day’s worth of work—whatever that means for you. Next day, before you write anything new, you revise and edit the previous day’s work. This is the first draft—the first time your write your book.

2. The Close-In Edit: Go back through your first draft, and revise and edit the entire manuscript on your computer. This is your second draft.

3. The Distance Edit: Next, you print a hard copy of the second draft of your entire manuscript. Hand-edit the hard copy, scrawling notes and profanities to yourself all the way through the margins. Go back into your computer file and revise the manuscript as needed. This is your third draft.

4. The Oral Edit Finally, you print a new hard copy and read your entire manuscript aloud. Read it to the walls, to your spouse, to the patrons at Starbucks, to your dog, to the bowl of soggy Cocoa Puffs left over from breakfast. Yes, it may take you several days, but that’s OK. Keep reading every word out loud until you’re done. As you read, note any places where the phrasing causes you to stumble, the wording feels confusing or out of place, or your mind seems to wander from the text in front of you. Those places need to be cut or rewritten, so as you’re reading aloud, pause to make notes as to what to do to improve them. When you’re done, incorporate your notes into the computer file of your manuscript.

I was pleased to discover that my editing process is similar. I already do Mike's step 1 during my process. Taking my experience from 15 years in the journalism field, I did three revisions over the Christmas break last year.

1. The first read was the first time I had read my whole book from beginning to end without stopping. I simply drew a quick line in the margin next to any errors or potential problems, and carried on reading.

2. My second revision was slower, pointing out proof-reading errors and then stopping at the problem areas and spending some time on them.

3. I then corrected these errors, and started on my third revision, which was similar to the first one - an actual reading of the whole novel. Of course, I still had to stop occasionally to make margin marks, and then I corrected these at the end of the reading.

The glaring omission in my process? The oral edit. While I do sometimes read paragraphs out loud to see how they sound, I've never read the whole novel. My editor sent me my final changes last week, and I spent the weekend playing around with them. So there's nothing left to do but step 4. If you hear someone talking endlessly to themselves this weekend, that will be me.