Good morning everyone. Take a deep breath and let it out. We have completed our first round of edits. We looked at each chapter and then we looked at the whole manuscript. Some of you will want to let it sit and then go through the process again (Don’t worry I will not be posting that as tasks here, one round of editing tasks was plenty).
While you will clearly do as many rounds of edits as needed to get the manuscript into shape, at some point if it is going to progress beyond a personal activity, you are going to have to let someone else see it. That’s right, you have to let someone else read your manuscript.
Now it is tempting to give it to someone who loves you and thinks that everything you do is wonderful, and perhaps that person does go on your list of readers, especially if you need encouragement. But they can’t be your only reader. I know it is the sad truth that when looking for feedback we have to take the negative with the positive and having someone who only gives you the positive may feel nice, but it doesn’t help.
Think of it this way. Would you rather have someone who likes and cares about you politely telling you that something in your manuscript seems off or confusing or like it is missing something so you can fix it or would you rather only take nice comments now and later have people you don’t actually know and who have no reason to be nice to you shred you publicly for something you could have easily fixed earlier?
By contrast you may have that one friend or family member who is overly critical of everything. You know they will tell you what they think and you will have all the flaws pointed out and possibly spotlighted, but opening yourself up for their their critique is a bit like shoving your psyche in a woodchipper.
In a first round of reading critiques they may be someone you avoid as well as the too nice everything is fabulous person.
So as we contemplate readers for this first round, we need to look for people who will read the manuscript, point out places where things didn’t make sense, or seemed long winded or unnecessarily complicated and therefore confusing but not someone who will shred your newly completed manuscript into coleslaw. Later, if you want to go for the overly critical, feel free. The point of this read through is to make sure that someone other than you can read the manuscript and understand all of it. Even though we have edited our manuscript, there are always things that slip through.
There are a lot of things that are going on in our brains when we write and even though we might have caught a bunch of the issues during editing, some things may still be in our heads that didn’t make it to the page. We have also seen this manuscript so much that we may have created blind spots for ourselves. This first read is to get someone else who doesn’t have all those extra details in their brains to look at the manuscript.
For this first read you need to think of 1-3 people to have read through your draft. And compiling that list is today’s task.
Task 162: Make a list of people you are willing to ask to read through this first draft.
Even if you only want one person to read, make a list with more than one name, as the person you initially come up with may not be able to read right now.
When thinking about people to ask, try to think about those who will give you honest feedback. Avoid those who will be too nice to you and not point out problems and avoid those who are overly critical just for the sake of being critical.
Try to choose people who read the genre in which you wrote the manuscript. Giving a person who loathes romance or science fiction a romance or science fiction based manuscript to read isn’t going to be all that helpful to you. They may be able to point out structural issues but as they don’t like reading the genre they aren’t going to enjoy the manuscript no matter how well you write. So choose someone who reads the sorts of things you write.
You don’t have to contact anyone at this point, today’s task is just about starting the list and thinking about the people we could ask.
As always, happy writing.
Ten til Midnight 