Make Your Readers Want You
It takes 3 drafts to expose your manuscript’s gold
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Writing a book is the best and worst of times.
Your creativity is on dripping off your fingertips, your concepts are throbbing to come alive, you can see your book sitting on the bookstore shelves tantalizing readers to taste its allure.
And then there are the aching, searing, muddy times when you stare at the blank screen/page/wall, waiting…alone.
Don’t wait! Don’t ache! Step outta the mud and into the love.
Just write it. Write about aching and waiting. Make your character ache and wait. Or write about how your boss or lover or fix-it person made you ache and wait until there was no love left between you. Talk about how waiting and aching is as hard as pulling your boot out of the sucking mud of a bad relationship.
The greatest beauty of author first drafts is that they’re filled with stuff the author must get out of their heart and head before they can rest. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing about cooking or surgery, an author’s first draft is — for them — their most essential.
The other beauty of first drafts is: NO EDITING. Take your finger off that highlighter! Leave words and sentences as they are until your first draft is fully written and ready to morph into a reader-friendly second draft.
Where first drafts are all about the writer/author, second drafts make your reader want more, more, more.
Second drafts are where you make love to the people turning the pages of your book.
You make it easy for them to accept your tantalizing message by streamlining your sentences so they’re easy to read.
First drafts become second drafts with good editing. No matter how many times you’ve gone over and over and over your manuscript, it’s still a first draft until a professional editor with a cold eye sees where the magic is hidden, the character incomplete, the structure needs rearranging, the language tier should adjust.
Professional editing is to good book reading what lotion is to lovemaking. Make it so…
