Me Write Pretty One Day: Preparing Your Manuscript
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Every manuscript begins with inspiration. But it’s a shifty, tempestuous thing, prone to short, violent fits and followed by long, terrible droughts. That when inspiration comes it is generally a messy regurgitation of all the weird, odd, unique little epiphanies you’ve subconsciously gathered—to be a little visceral—is par for the course. And when they all start to gurgle up at once you just have to find the nearest toilet bowl and hunch over until it’s all out and done.
Was that a little too gross of a metaphor?
What I mean is that after your first draft, what sits there on the page is oftentimes a jumbled heap of good ideas surrounded by loads of bad writing. You cannot write a perfect first draft. Ever. Just doesn’t happen. And the last thing you want to do is send your first attempt to an agent or a publisher. We’re simply too busy to sift through the muck and wait for your good ideas uncover themselves. We don’t have the time or the patience (as much as we wish we did) to constantly go mining for diamonds in the rough.
What you’ve got is about five pages. Five. The first five pages (and this is double-spaced, size twelve, Times New Roman or Courier, one inch margin, tabbed indent pages) are what it takes for the person reading your manuscript to decide if it’s worth pursuing at all. You might be lucky and get ten pages, or you might be unlucky and get two. But it’s best to assume that if you don’t hook us in at five pages, then your manuscript isn’t where it needs to be.
But be not afraid, for I’m not here to scare you off. I’m here to help you shape your jumbled heap (from the first five pages to the last) into something pretty. And all in five deceptively simple (but really not-so-terrifyingly massive) steps: continue reading
