Writing the second draft of your novel.
Finally finished? Blissful freedom? That's not a light at the end of a tunnel, that's an oncoming train.
If you have just finished writing your novel, set it down, take a step away, and lock that sucker in a cupboard. Seal it up with chains. Light it on fire. Destroy it. You thought you had to tear your soul out the last round? Welcome to round two, where your novel comes back from the dead with a vengeance and stomps upon the heart analogy gifted to you by a wonderful wizard (who, might I note, will not edit your novel for you. He isn't that wonderful).
Step one: A novel is like a fine wine. (It might also make you whine.)
Give your novel a bit of time to sit and stew. Like a good wine, like a good soup, like a good
many
things, a novel needs a little bit of time. It'll let the characters mingle like the oh so magnificent flavors of a good chowder and the fermentation process will do one other thing: it'll let you forget. You need a little bit of time to forget how much it hurt to tear your heart into pieces and mash it onto the page. You need a bit of time to forget how much you hate that scene. Right now, you're emotionally attached to your novel and you need to cut the strings and drown your sorrows in a pot of tea.
Come back when you're sober. Didn't know you could get drunk on tea? Try writing a novel. You can get drunk on anything as long as the words are flowing.
The time you need to take depends on just how involved you were with the novel. Trust me when I say you need the time to forget that you hate this scene and this character, or the red pen will come on too strong. Trust me when I say you need time to forget how much you loved this character and this scene.
The second draft is cruel. There is no exact length of time. A week, a month, a half a year. Come back when you can read your novel with fresh eyes, and be excited to read a sentence you'd entirely forgotten.
1.5:
Don't take too long to pick up your novel again, though. While it's exciting to read it as though it were someone else's story, you need to keep a little bit of the enthusiastic attitude from completing a work of art as well. Editing is a tough job. I would not personally wait more than a year, for fear of new and exciting sirens calling from the swamp.
Who wants to do the chore of editing when you have a new universe to unfold?
Step Two: Meet your new best friend.
No matter how you wrote your novel in round one, you're about to be acquainted to someone you might not like very much: Mr. Outline. Our friendly neighborhood synopsis will help you control your story in draft two. Where draft one might have been a wild explosion of character diarrhea onto a page, creating an outline is going to help you tame that stomach bug into something a little more controllable.
So write out a play by play outline of your first draft if you didn't write one to begin with and take a look at the cards. Novels follow a few standard patterns and that cohesive plot foundation is going to be what you're building draft two on: the beginning, the middle, the climax, and the end.
You might have fifty-seven subplots, but you need to be able to find a controlled thread through the story, which follows the protagonist. This is what you're going to build draft two on: this is the foundation of your novel.
Chop your novel up into little tiny scene sized pieces and then remove all of the unnecessary bits until you're left with just the plot sized piece. The plot sized piece should finish this statement: "my main character wants this, but..."
Understand there is a difference between a plot and a premise. Imagine that there is a doorway. Yes, it can be a fancy Victorian archway covered in vines. Or perhaps just an ordinary screen door. Maybe it's hooked up to a vast digital system, and maybe the door was handed down from generations past. But it's still just a door. The premise is the door. The plot is what slams the door shut in the main character's face, and how they get it open again. Your premise might very well be "nanobots are causing men to become infertile" but that's not a plot until your main character discovers that he's the only one left on the planet with fertile sperm and must single-handedly save the human race, but in the process destroy his marriage with his very traditional, monogamous wife.
The plot is what happens. If you can't bring your novel down to a sentence about what happens, maybe you need to rethink the action in the novel. What does your main character want, and what's keeping that character from getting it?
Step two might seem fiddly, but it'll save you a lot of pain if you discover the fault in your foundation before you try redecorating.
