Ever dreamed of writing a novel but didn't know where to start? Now's the perfect time to pick up your pen (or keyboard) and dive into the world of storytelling—no experience needed, just your imagination.
In a new series, author and critic Aimée Walsh offers some tips for the budding novelist.
It's worth knowing that the book won't completely reveal itself until a messy first draft is written. All the ideas and linguistic sketching in the initial draft manuscript will help you to realise what the story is actually about. This will morph and change during the drafting process. Don’t worry about it, it’s a normal evolution of the manuscript. Words on the page are all that matters for the initial stages, it will be polished and refined through numerous edits to reveal a final text.
Once you’ve got the words on the page for your first draft, then the work really begins in honing the manuscript into something you can show other people. Now, let’s be real: every first draft is terrible. Make peace with the fact that that document is for your eyes only. This will undoubtedly take the pressure off you. If there is one lesson to take from this series, please let it be that. If you are sat around a pub table with somebody who claims to write perfectly on their first go at it, know this: they are delusional. My novel Exile went through upwards of ten drafts before it was published. You will be sick of reading it. That is totally normal. I’ve pulled together some suggestions to help you with the editing process as you make your way through the drafts.
Watch: Margaret Atwood's Top 5 writing tips
There are two main edits that will happen when you are contracted by a publisher to release a book: structural and line-edit. It is good practice to approach your manuscript with these two edits in mind, to ensure that it is in as clean a state as possible before it goes out on submission to publishers to bid on. Broadly, the structural edit is a 'bigger picture’ edit while the line-edit gets into the work at a sentence level.
Now, let's be real: every first draft is terrible.
Think of your first edit as a structural one. For a structural edit, you should read through the manuscript with a mind to question whether you need to add lighter moments to contrast any trauma narrative, or maybe you might want to add a character that will allow you to show your protagonist in a new light. You may need an extra character to be written in to add drama, to increase tension. Likewise, this is a time to consider if something isn’t working for the novel, so don’t be afraid to cut whole chapters if they don’t fit in the story as a whole.
A question to ask yourself is: does this particular scene narratively make sense at this point in the book? This is the time to be considerate about the work, to really dig into what you are trying to achieve with the novel. Consider, too, what information you tell the reader and when. You may want to move a scene to a later stage of the novel, to build suspense.
a messy first draft is written.'
For the line-edit: Go through each chapter, sentence by sentence with a fine-tooth comb. Double check that the tenses, the points of view, and time slips as you read through the work. Once you have gone through all of these re-reads and edits, print the novel and start the process again.
When you are at the stage where you have moved beyond the first draft, you could ask writers, friends, or family to read your work for feedback. While you may not accept every edit suggestion, you will need to be prepared to continue editing and thinking about feedback.
You might ask: when will I know to stop editing, printing, and re-editing ad infinitum? That’s the golden question. Knowing when to stop comes down to intuition. It is your prerogative. You will know when the writing has reached a stage that you are happy to send it out to agents, editors, and literary journals.
In the next article, I will give you tips on how to bridge this gap from Word document manuscript to the printed article...
Read previous entries in this series from Aimée Walsh here
