First draft finished? Congrats!

Some say write what you know. Others want you to write what you think and some advice you to write what you feel. In the end it doesn’t matter what you write, they say, as long as you write. I agree. It all starts with the letters on the page. Even if you dictate your book into your phone and let the computer put it on the page. If you keep writing you end up with a first draft.

But, when they say what to write they’re not actually telling you what to write. They encourage you to do YOUR writing. The message is: write from your heart. You are angry, write as the angry person you are. You think something is hilariously funny, write from that POV. You know something about something, you write for your readers to learn about it.

The above encouragement is for the beginning writer. No matter what you write, fiction, nonfiction or memoir. Let’s say you write memoir. You went to that place in your heart and mind and wrote down what you remember. How you felt about it. How it changed you. Done. Good. Congrats. That’s hard stuff. Never gets any easier. Now what? Let’s see.

For certain you will marvel at it. Why wouldn’t you? It’s a precious part of you. This is your creation. You recognize it as something familiar yet strangely new. You’ve created something that now exists outside of you. You can look at it and get new ideas from it. You can have a dialogue with it. What do you mean by that? Why should I care?

Now the real fun begins: revision. That’s the part they refer to when they say just write, the rest will follow. What follows is the rest of a long road to publishing your book. But what exactly should you be doing next? You’re looking for help.

You share your work with your trusted writing group. They give you encouragement to keep going. They have good advice on how to smooth out that kink. But none of them get the entire picture and none of them can tell you what to do exactly. And if they do, you might not like it. Best case scenario, you ignore them. Worst case scenario, you resent them.  

You start to polish your draft. But here’s what they don’t tell you when they say the rest will follow: You will get to a messy part. A part that is so rough not even you understand it, let alone have any idea how it got there. You attempt to clean up the mess, patch the rough parts and polish the edges.

But some of the mess is so difficult to deal with you’d rather skip over than keep polishing. Now you start looking for all the places that are not working. No matter how much you go at them to smooth them out. That’s when a lot of writers give up. Yep, that’s the moment they realize that the beautiful writing they did is a hot mess and too much work to finish. The task at hand overwhelms them. Where to begin?

Here comes the good news. There is help. Professional help.

What kind of help should you get, you ask? Well, that depends on where you are in the process. What do you need? Someone to look at your grammar? Hire a copy editor. You want to cross your t’s and dot your i’s? Get a proof reader. But, if you finished your first draft, to pay someone to polish your mess is a waste of time and money. It’s way too early for that.

You need someone who knows how to guide you through revision. Someone who cheers you on because they not only believe in you but also in the work you do. Someone well-read who knows what a story needs to attract readers. A bouncing board to throw your ideas out and see which stick. You need a bullshit detector. Someone who points you to the parts that need more work. An accountability partner who keeps you on track when the road gets rough.

You’ve guessed it, that someone is a book coach. Someone who is with you all the way from conception to first draft. From final draft to book proposal. A book coach is in it for the long haul. From manuscript assessment and developmental editing right down to line editing. A book coach stays at your side on the rocky road to finishing your book.

Before we celebrate the publication of your book let’s go back to the beginning. If you are serious about publishing a book, hire a book coach. The earlier the better. Some get their support before they start writing, some when they have their first draft. It’s never too early and never too late to get what you need. What do you need?

Spit balling ideas? Homing in on the story you want to tell? Finding the right structure and creating a compelling narrative arc? With a book coach you’ll get answers to all your questions. When you reach that final page there is no doubt in your mind that this is the story you wanted to write. This is your story and it’s holding up, rough patches and all. Now polishing begins for real and it’s going to be fun.

Rough patches will be there no matter where you are in the process. But they will not make you feel insecure about the goal of your journey. Your story will hold together and won’t collapse when you take out an excessive piece of writing. You will shape what seemed a small detail at the beginning into a major turning point of your story.  

You’ll have fun with your own creation, a living organic matter, that you can trim and shape to perfection.