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.

First Draft

Whew! Sorry for my prolonged absence. I had the flu. My dog peed on my homework. The traffic was jammed on the information superhighway, I was pursued by saber-tooth tigers etc.

But I promised you a rough-draft, so here I am.

The rough draft is your very first attempt to throw together a scene or section of your book. It doesn't have to be perfect or even pretty. It's your first, vague outline of what that scene or section will look like.

The rough draft differs from a free-write in that in the rough draft, you will spend more time thinking and making decisions about what you are writing. You will stop and start, re-examine your details, think about what it is you want to say.

As you write, you will be trying to figure out how you will pack in all the information you have written in your journal. There just may not be room. What is the most important information to keep? If you're falling short of 500 words, can you add more expanded details? Do you have an anecdote that would support your point, or make your character more real?

Now start writing this little bitty piece of your book.

Make it at least 500 words long but it's probably best not to go beyond 750 yet. 500-750 words usually adds up to 3 or 4 double-spaced pages. This should take you an hour more or less, but don't worry if it's a lot more-or-less. Maybe you were extra-inspired, or it was hard to get the words rolling. You will get better with practice.

You get started. I'll go empty my dishwasher and come back when you're done.
(about an hour later)

Okay, fed my chickens, refreshed my coffee. Are you done writing yet? Wonderful.

You're not done for the day, though. (actually, that's up to you: If you're completely exhausted, go ahead and save this next bit until tomorrow).

Your next step is to get feedback. Because Feedback is important and I want to say several things about getting the best feedback possible, I'm going to start a new post on:

Constructive Criticism