FAQ Month: How to Get Published Step Three

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while. Life got pretty busy for a while.

Exams. Play practices. Field Trips. Performances. Homework.

No time to write (unless you count the two hundred words I squeezed in during Espanol). No time to blog.

You know, the typical occupational hazards of a full time student, writer, runner, and teenager. It's a miracle that 1) I can see the floor of my room and 2) my friends are understanding about my entire no-time-for-a-social-life thing. (okay, I sort of have a social life, but just barley).

I'm happy to announce that my last performance in And A Child Shall Lead is tonight, so I'll get back to blogging, and writing, and sleeping more than four hours.


So I've got around twenty minutes to throw together this last post before tutoring (oh, did I forget to mention the SAT prep, even though I don't take it for another three years).

So we've read, and written. That means it's time to edit.

You've spent anywhere from a month to a year on your manuscript. Your fingers are now so muscular that they're unproportional (yes, I'm pretty sure I made that word up because spell check says it doesn't exist), to the rest of your body. Let's not even get started on the state of your mind. Chances are it's not good. It's so frazzled that you can only communicate with the smallest of words. Like mamma, pappa, grande vanilla bean frapachino (the kind without coffee), and book. Not even novel, just book.

That's what you need. That's what you want! YOU JUST WROTE AN ENTIRE BOOK AND GOSH DARN IT! YOU'RE GOING TO READ IT. It's the only thing you can do. So you ask mamma for a grande vanilla bean frapachino and settle yourself in your favorite chair (the one with the purple fuzzy pillows). And you read.


And you think you're the best thing since Harper Lee.

You're so great, everyone needs to see your genius, and hey, if you have a few typos or grammatical errors, that's okay, you're only fourteen after all.

So you put your work out there. On figment. On Yahoo Answers. To a critique partner. To your parents.

And this is the feedback you get.

From figment:
Some people will drool over it, others will say it's okay.

On Yahoo Answers:
Chances are they'll go easy on you, point out a few grammatical errors and say you have potential. Try publishing when you get a little older.

From a critique partner:
They'll say it's good and complement you on something.

Your parents:
Might break down in tears because their little baby has written a novel (and that tops any A+ first grade science project from your past).

And if someone doesn't like it or says it stinks, that's fine, because they're old, and ugly, and can't write better than you. They're just jealous.

So, like many other newbie writers, I ignored the people who made the slightest indication that they thought it was bad. I shunned helpful feedback. I became extremely defensive whenever anyone said anything.

I wasn't looking for a critique, I was looking for someone to tell how wonderful I was, how great it is, how it should be published right away, and possibly that they sent it to their uncle who is the top dog at a publishing company and you're being published.


It doesn't work that way. After I completed my first novel (November of 2010), I ignored all the feedback. I told myself I was as good as any published author. I let people tell me how good I was, when I should have been listening to the people who were doing this:

(Yeah, it's pretty bad. I still can't believe I thought it was publish worthy... I've written better things in the fifth grade, and I have proof of that). 

It's taken me a long time to realize this, but the only way to get good at writing is to put yourself out there. YOU WANT TO BE HURT. You need someone to knock you back down. Someone who's not afraid to tell you your writing is crap and you're never going to be published.

Here's the shocker. You need to believe them. If someone says your writing is that bad, there is something wrong with whatever you wrote. It doesn't mean you're a bad writer, it just means that the passage you gave to your critique was horrible, and you need to fix it. 

That's where the beauty of the editing process comes in. 

Everyone writes awful first drafts, but what separates the published authors from the hopeless wanna-bes is how you receive feedback and what you do with it. 

So put yourself out there. Get hurt. Then put your manuscript away for a while, a week, a month, a year. Then come back when you aren't so defensive and re-read your critiques. You'll understand that 99% of them are completely right. Then get editing. 

Start with the big stuff, like: 

The plot, the conflict and all the other things. Should this chapter go here, do I need this chapter, etc.

Then get a bit smaller:

Do I need this paragraph?

And smaller:

Is this sentence okay.

Until you're onto the tinsy winsy details: 

Do I need this word? Could I use another? Oh, should that be a period or a comma. 

Once you're done, re-read it for any mistakes and put yourself out there again.

After repeating this process until you get mostly (note mostly, because there will always be people who dislike your writing no matter what you do) positive reviews, then start trying to publish it.