This apt cartoon came from The Madman’s Scribbles.
Welcome back to 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book!
With Dream of a City of Ruin finally off for the first round of beta reading, I can return to, and hopefully finish, the project I started during the sunniest summer in the history of the pacific northwest. You can thank today’s cloudy weather for this installment!
In case you haven’t been waiting here on the edge of your seats for its return, I’ll briefly summarize what I’ve been doing with 101 TIWIK. In essence, I’m trying corral in one place all of the writing skills and advice I’ve gained over the fifteen or so years I’ve been doing this. The first 44 installments have been mostly about the tools of the trade, things like scene-building, types of narrative, density, style and voice, and the four big elements of fiction: plot, character, setting, and theme.
For the next 57 installments, I’m going to be covering the writing process, from beginning to end. Today, I’ll start by briefly defining the stages of the writing process. In the coming weeks, I’ll be expanding on these definitions with several posts dedicated to each stage.
Before I begin, I should mention that although I’m organizing them roughly chronologically, the writing process is rarely linear. For example, while planning is essentially the first step, you will probably return to planning throughout the process.
While I’ll be referring to my personal process a lot in these posts, this list is not merely “how I do it;” these are universal stages in everyone’s writing process to some degree.
1. Planning: Developing a method to meet your objective of writing a book. Planning includes understanding your ultimate goal for writing the book and how to meet that goal in addition to simply writing the book (money? personal fulfilment? entertainment?). Planning can take many forms, from planning the project (scheduling, to-do lists, etc) to planning the content of the book (outlines, summaries) to business planning and planning your marketing strategy.
2. Drafting: Perhaps the most obvious, easy to define stage of writing, drafting is putting words on the page. In future posts I’ll discuss some methods for drafting more effectively.
3. Re-Writing: Re-Writing is the stage where you make dramatic changes to work you’ve drafted. It can include cutting entire sections and adding in whole new sections, removing or dramatically changing plotlines or characters.
4. Revising: Revising is the stage where you make changes to a draft that are less dramatic than a re-write, but still on the scene level rather than the line level. Revision often encompasses changes made to improve the pacing, flow, clarity, and tension of the story. In a revision, the plot, characters, setting and theme essentially remain unchanged but are more clearly illustrated. For example, in a revision, you might add in a scene showing how evil the villain is, but you aren’t changing the nature of the character.
5. Line Edit: A line edit encompasses changes made on the sentence level to improve the readability of the book. Line editing is about restructuring syntax to state things more clearly, or with fewer words. It can include removing cliches, over-used words, and repetitive phrases. Line editing is essentially about style, where copy-editing and proofreading are about being technically correct.
6. Copy Edit: As I said, copy-editing is all about the technical details, making sure the text is grammatically correct, usage is consistent, facts are correct.
7. Formatting: Formatting is the process of taking the manuscript and turning it into a book. Formatting includes technical questions like margins, font and headers and footers, but also style questions like chapter titles, whether to include a prologue, what kind of front and back matter to include, etc.
8. Proofreading: Proofreading is the very last stage before distribution. It means looking over everything, from the content to the formatting, to be sure it is error free. You should avoid making any large changes after proofreading, or you run the risk of introducing new errors to a proofread book.
9. Community: This is the stage where you share your book with a community, whether it be readers, other writers, your mother, an editor, or a blog no one reads. It is somewhat deceptive to put this stage at the end of this list. You might start sharing your writing with your community during the planning stage. It is inadvisable to not share it with anyone until after the proofreading stage. Community can also extend even before the planning stage in the form of the influences of other authors and resource books on your writing.
The stages of writing mix differently for everyone. For certain stages, like copy-editing, you might hire an expert. However, you will need to understand each stage so that even if you do hire someone, you get your money’s worth. Also, the better you understand each stage, the better you will become at producing a clean draft that requires less work in the other stages.
While you might start the writing process in the drafting stage, or in the community stage, or perhaps even in the formatting stage (don’t judge–everyone has a unique process!), I’m going to start with planning in the next post: 101 TIWIK #46: Planning: Clarify Your Ideal.
