Scott R. Welvaert

First off, CONGRATULATIONS! Even if you didn’t reach the full 50K in 30 days, you likely have some pages on hand to work with. And if you reached the goal, you have a solid start on your novel. So, huzzah! But as Han Solo once said, “Don’t get cocky.” You have breached a huge milestone in your journey, no doubt. But I won’t lie. This is just the beginning of the quest. The tutorial mission. Level 1. You earned your +1 dagger and a healing potion, but ahead, there be dragons.

But as someone who has gone through the novel drafting process many times now, celebrate this accomplishment and get excited. This is where the fun begins, where to take your lop-sided, irregular lump of clay and shape it into an elegant vase. And much like preparing to draft your novel, the editing, revising, and rewriting of your draft should come with a few key steps to get your manuscript even closer to getting an agent, or getting it published.

The good news is I have a few things that I have used in this part of the journey that really helped me. So, maybe these can be helpful:

• Novel structure—Reread your draft and make notes of anything structural that isn’t working. Does the narrative flow naturally for readers? Does it build to a climax? Does the middle have tension and agency? Or is it filler? If you used some of the story structure templates, I mentioned in the last two months, hopefully, this isn’t that big of a deal. The key here is your audience should be able to follow it relatively easily without putting your book down. Ex. In my upcoming book Escape from Atlantis City, I used “flashback” chapters to key the audience into the backstory of the main character, but I may have confused the audience between those chapters and the main narrative, so I created a narrative device to tell them up front—“These chapters are different.”
• The plot—Through your reread, make a note of plot inconsistencies. If you’re writing fantasy, for example, your world-building should explain how the magic system works before a character just whips it out on an enemy. Plot holes too. For example, in my third book, my main characters investigate the scene of a crime and track their friend down from that scene. Then the villains attack out of the blue, which makes little sense logically. So, I had to go back and explain why the villains just didn’t follow the friend straight from the attack. Stuff like that pulls readers out of your story. And they’re easy fixes.
• Characters—For your characters, the most important things to look for are their consistency in their beliefs, attitudes, and mannerisms, at least until their character arc changes them. Then the audience should start seeing a gradual shift as they learn and lean into their primary character change. Another thing to look out for is their interaction and engagement with each other. It should look, sound, and feel real to your audience. They should be relatable to your audience. For example, in one of my books, the main character makes a sacrifice to save his love interest. But there in those final chapters, the characters didn’t work together. Everything I had built did not have an emotional pay-off. So, I cut that entire character, created a new one, altered their backstory to be a past, childhood girlfriend and bam, the characters sung together.
• Setting and world-building—Much like your characters, your settings should be evocative, engaging and painted on the page with great sensory description. Even if your world is our “real” world, you need to paint that setting so that your audience feels that immersion. Don’t assume a reader has been to Savannah, Georgia—show it to us. And when defining your world, especially if it’s a fictional one, make sure your audience understands how things work differently from this one, like currency, magic, technology, etc. In my third book, it takes place in an alternate Victorian era Europe where genetic manipulation advanced faster than in our world. So, I showed this by people in the world being devoid of disease, physical flaws, and other ailments, but then also the forests and the countryside contain scientific abominations from illegal experimentation.

• Dialogue—This is simple. Dialogue should uncover or advance character or plot. If there’s a lot of riff-raff like greetings and platitudes in the dialogue, it gets boring. A big one for dialogue is subtext. People don’t just spew dialogue straight from their brains or tell the truth. Sometimes characters hide information or lie to not show a particular emotion. For example, during a conversation with a married couple that are having trouble, they wouldn’t just tell their emotions outright. There’d be a lot of “Oh, it’s nothing. Nevermind.” Or things like that. When you’re at a party you didn’t want to go to, very few walk around saying, “This blows. I hate it here.” No, their speech is likely bristling with false positivity as they muscle their way through it. Pare your dialogue down to exactly what you need and remove anything that’s not engaging.
• Scenes—The unspoken rule with scenes and chapters to some extent is that, when put together, they create a kind of sine graph of rising emotion/action/intensity followed by a period of thought/reaction/rest. This provides the ebb and flow to the narrative and raises your audience’s blood pressure in one turn, then lets the rest, before yanking them up the roller coaster again. So, look at that ebb and flow. The other thing scenes do is break up narration to ground your audience back in your world to provide them a tether back to something grounded and not stuck in character’s heads.

• Theme—If you started out your draft with a critical theme, then during this big chonk revision make note of where you evoked your theme and where you didn’t. And if that theme doesn’t present itself enough naturally or organically, then figure out a way to address it. Again, just don’t outright say it, but develop natural ways to echo it throughout the narrative.

• Clarity—I wrote a romance book once. Not my forte, but hey, it got me to explore the genre. But the story revolved around a gargoyle that was petrified by day and alive by night, and who falls in love with a blind human girl. My first draft came back from the editor with one note repeated all over the manuscript—CLARIFY. I wrote that book for a middle grade audience, and even though I balked at the edits, the editor said, “The writer has the luxury of having the complete story in their head, the audience does not.” Much of the lore and concepts of the gargoyle I didn’t clarify, so I had to make sure that was coming across to the audience. So, after learning that, I just assume that whatever threshold I have for what’s clear or not needs to be lowered by 25-50% to make sure clarity wins over. If the audience doesn’t understand your story or its underlying concepts, you risk losing them.
• Readability—This element goes together with clarity. Clarity covers explaining topical concepts enough for reading comprehension, whereas readability is more about the language and sentence level for your audience. For example, if you’re writing for an adult audience, you can use more complex vocabulary and sentence style and not inhibit their ability to read the book. However, with younger audience sets, you need to adapt your language and sentence structure to be more accessible for those younger audiences that may likely have lower reading comprehension.

• Word choice variance—This element comes down to a lot of the generic language we use when drafting: good, fast, bad, very, large, etc. I won’t get to all of them here, since there is a TON of coverage on this sort of thing on the internet from established authors. Here’s one to check out. But do some research and find lists of basic words that could really use a makeover. Then take a few hours to search those words and edit them to heighten your prose.
• Active verbs—This one is critical. Passive voice is deadly in creative writing. And it’s hard to avoid as that’s how humanity speaks. But passive voice on the page will bore your audience. Take this, for example. “There was a cat on the table by the bowl of fruit.” The cat just exists there. So passive. What if we change it? “A cat naps on a table by a bowl of fruit.” See how the cat is actively doing something now besides just existing. Search through your manuscript and isolate instances of passive voice and edit them to be active.

• Glam up your language—This may be trickier for less trained writers, but it’s always good to try. The idea is to infuse a more poetic affectation to descriptive language, but also the sound of language, using assonance and consonance to bring a measure of music to your writing. Like this sentence:

“The white clouds hung in the blue sky.”