You've finished your novel. Well done! Now it's time to get to work.

Work? you protest. Ok, maybe a bit of tinkering, but the work is over. Sorry. Unless you're a genius, you are mistaken. Your manuscript in its first draft is merely the raw material for the final book. Your first draft is a shaggy lump of inspiration and creation, poured hot from the fires of your mind and heart. Now it is cooling and, like iron, must be beaten into its final sharp, enduring state before the heat goes out of it entirely.

Some people begin to rewrite straight away, before putting the MS into isolation. Some put it away first, then come back when their eye has become more objective. If you tend to lose interest in your story if you put it away after the first draft, then begin to rewrite at once. There will come a stage when you know it has to spend time in the deep freeze before you can see anything new.

But let's talk about working on that raw first draft. Start by reading the whole thing through, jotting short notes as you go, not attempting to tinker with specific problems right now. What you are looking for in this first read-through are faults in consistency, pacing, connections, and drama. Faults in these areas have to be solved first before you tinker with the language.

Consistency covers many things. Are the details constant, or does somebody's hair change colour halfway through the story? Is the flow of time clear? Do people speak in the same way throughout? You might have an inner-city gang member forget to speak in slang. Are motivations consistent? Is each character's journey through the story an intelligible arc, or does one of them have an unaccounted-for change in personality? Are the characters wandering through the story doing a little of this, a little of that, for no consistent reason?

This leads to pacing. Beginning writers tend to panic about making their story long enough, so they stuff the story full of Styrofoam to bulk it out, that is, they wedge filler between the action. Styrofoam does not nourish the reader. It is boring. As you read through, mark every time you became impatient or bored. Your story should be a climb from that first moment when your protagonist is impelled to act, to the final resolution of his or her reason for acting. If there are long, slow sections that could be removed without injuring the flow of action, cut them.

Connections. Have you built them in? Connections between characters, such as showing why two people are falling in love, or why two people are enemies. Connections with a place (what is it between Scarlett O'Hara and Tara?). Connections between your background events and your foreground story, such as having background historical events mirror or counterpoint your protagonist's action (e.g. the shooting of JFK occurring as your hero loses his political innocence in Viet Nam). Foreshadowing is also a connection, tying together early and later actions. If you see places where you can insert or strengthen connections to the enrichment of the story, jot them down as you read.

Drama is what a story is all about. If it isn't entertaining, it doesn't deserve to live. Is there conflict of some sort in every scene of your first draft? Do you care about the people you should care about? Or did you go off the rails somewhere? A story that has slipped its leash and gone on a frolic of its own tends to have no dramatic structure. It's becomes one damn thing after another. The difference between a story and a tale is that the story is crafted, and the tale "jest growed." A story is interesting by design; a tale, if at all, by accident.

Having read through your first draft with these four aspects in mind, you can now begin the rewriting. Start at the first page and make all the changes you wrote down in your first reading, checking always for consistency as you alter details. Print out the revised version and go through it again. And again. Start honing the language, removing the deadwood (such as unnecessary qualifiers, descriptions, and interior monologue) and trying to make each sentence both fresh and concise. If you haven't yet put the manuscript away for a rest, do so after four or five rewrites. Your eye and inner ear will need the break, and you will be more ruthless when you return to it.

When everything is fixed as much as you can fix it, look again at the first five or ten pages of the first chapter, especially the first five paragraphs. Are they as enticing and gripping as you can possibly make them? Do they pull the reader into the story? Your opening scene is your only chance of capturing a reader, so it has to be right. Spend as long as you need to make it right.

And then you're done. How many re-writes do you need to do? Some people do three or four, others do a dozen. Always do one more than you think you can bear to do. Then send it out. Once an editor accepts it, you will begin rewriting all over again—and that is work you'll want to do!

Copyright 1998 Caro Clarke

Here are the other writing advice columns I have written for NovelAdvice, the on-line advice column for novice writers: