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You’ve Completed Your Opus – Now What?

By CAPT George Galdorisi, USN (Ret.)

You have embraced what you learned in our previous writing columns, you’ve completed your novel, ideally between seventy thousand and ninety thousand words – the “industry standard” for today’s market. You are ready for the world to read your work. Not so fast. There is more to do. Call it tough love, but now the real work begins.

Yes, I know, you are thinking: “It was a lot of work to pen these eighty thousand words. I’m exhausted. I just want to launch this into the world and start spending my royalties.” As President Bill Clinton famously said, “I feel your pain.” You can launch it into the world now. But is it ready?

I’ll bet you are exhausted. Writing a first draft of a novel is a tiring experience. So reward yourself. Put your novel aside. Go get a workout. Or take a vacation. Just chill for a while.

As you find your way back in front of your computer monitor, think of yourself as a contractor building your own house. You’ve framed the structure, put in the drywall, and now you have to make the house livable. There should be joy and a sense of accomplishment in what you are doing, not a sense of dread.

Begin by editing your novel as if it were written by someone else. This is crucial as it takes you outside of your own ego and lets you be as objective as possible. Even if you have told a great story, you now must work – and work hard – to make sure that it is something an agent or editor will embrace.

Here are some tactics, techniques, and procedures that I always use when I am editing my own writing and I offer them to you as “inside baseball” to help you polish your story:

• Agents and editors are the “gatekeepers” who you must enlist as your allies to get your story to the world. First and foremost, they have a love of the English language. This is my way of saying that if you have forgotten much of what you learned in school K-16, it might be time to refresh your memory. This means polished prose that follows the standards of our language. Make this your top editing priority: Are you giving English language the TLC it deserves?

• While you must do more than just “spell check” your work, you would be well-served to exploit Microsoft Word for all it is worth. Use it to spell check, grammar check, and find better words via the thesaurus (not to find big, fancy words, but just to eliminate “echoes,” that is, the same word multiple times on the same page).

• Readers tire of pages and pages of scene (people talking) and summary (descriptions of what is happening). Check your opus for balance and feather in scene and summary so you bounce back and forth between the two frequently.

• Beginning writers often have the same length paragraphs throughout the book. Readers find this annoying. Mix it up thoughtfully, short, long, mid-length in a good flow.

• Think about how people really speak. Too many beginning writers have a scene where two people are talking using long, beautifully constructed sentences. They never interrupt each other, they never have their thoughts trail off, they just deliver speeches to each other. That’s not realistic and it will make your novel “unreal.”

• In a similar fashion, don’t overdo it with trying to use colloquial language: The southerner with the drawl, the New Yorker with sharp language, the vamp who sounds like Mae West. You get the idea.

• Lastly, sex. If it needs to be in your book, go ahead. But if all you are doing is inserting a gratuitous sex-scene to excite readers, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Perhaps enough for now. If your curiosity has kicked in and you don’t want to wait for the next issue of Rotor Review, try this link to my website: https://www.georgegaldorisi. com/. Other than writing thrillers, I like nothing more than connecting with readers. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter, and learn more about my books, blogs and other writing on my website. For those of you trying to up your game regarding any kind of writing, check out my “Writing Tips,” which offer useful advice for all writers, from established authors to future best-selling writers.