The Final Draft!

At last! The final draft of scene one! How exciting.

Today, take your rough draft from yesterday with all the suggestions you and your Responsive Reader have made and rewrite it using all the new information you now have. Need more expanded details? Stick 'em in there. Did your reader get confused? Explain what you meant. Did you do a bit of extra research to answer a reader's question? Slip that in. Maybe you realized you need to move some paragraphs around to make better sense.

That's it! That's all there is to it!

Well, not really. The truth is, you are going to come back to this bit of your book and all the others over and over as you learn more and get a better sense of where your book needs to go and what it needs to do.

But for now, you can set this first bit of your final draft aside, pat yourself on the back and start all over again with Lesson One.

This time, to get ideas for your free write, you may go back to your original list of ideas or scenes for your book, or you might want to sit down with part one and make out a list of questions or ideas that arise out of that first section.

Pick the most interesting of those ideas and go back to Monday's lesson: The Free Write.

There's more to writing a book than just free-writing and expanded details. In my next post, I'll talk about choosing and understanding your audience.