Steps to Produce a Novel

Any writer aspiring to authorship should enjoy the movie Genius, an excerpted biopic of legendary editor Max Perkins’s 1930s professional relationship with Thomas Wolfe, Earnest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, based on the far superior book, Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg (1978).

In one scene, Wolfe brings cartons of handwritten pages of a manuscript to Perkins who edits it, paring it down, reordering scenes, and identifying plot issues. Back then, editors did that. Not so today. We must excise imperfections ourselves, add, delete, and alter, scenes, characters, and plot points. If you want to traditionally publish your manuscript, it must be clean or neither an acquisitions editor nor agent will touch it.

If you choose to self-publish, you’ll self-edit, then hire a copyeditor.

You’re sophisticated enough to understand that writing a novel is not the end of writing the novel. You’ve read books and blogs about the sundry stages of editing: developmental, line, copy, proofreading. You’ve checked out freelancers (Fiverr.com?) and learned that going full-boat for an 80K novel will run—in round figures—$10K.

You’ve decided to do as much self-editing as you can.

A Word Frequency Counter

The WFC is an essential tool to clearly identify passive voice, weak vocabulary, repetitive words and phrases, overuse of adverbs and adjectives, hackneyed verbs, and a host of writing foibles, of which we are all guilty.

Tool #5: Background Knowledge

Alluded to in the opening paragraph, you should have read several books on the art and mechanics of writing. You must have a reasonable understanding of the English language. See our Library for a sampling of our favorite reference materials.

However, misconceptions abound with regard to how the publishing industry works in the 21st century. To clear the palate, I digress:

Bottom line: unless you have thousands of dollars to invest in a thorough edit, follow the recommendations we present, do the work, and have a manuscript you’d be proud to have anyone read.