How do you write a novel? Part II After you type "The End"

Leonid Pasternak's painting, The Throes of Creation (wikimedia commons)

You've congratulated yourself. Your friends (the ones who know about your secret addiction to writing) have congratulated you. You're imagining the New York Times bestseller list with your book and your name featured prominently. The offer from the film company. Strolling up the red carpet at the premiere, with flashbulbs and requests for comments from the media.

Scroll back a few pages. The work on your first novel is not done when you type "The End". Here's what remains:

Take a breather. Sit on the porch sipping iced tea, or clean house (if it's like mine, it needs it because I'd rather write than clean), or catch up on the leisure activities you've skipped while writing The Secret of the Dragon's Gall Bladder or Jenny's Pirate Duke or whatever. Give it a week or two, or maybe a month.

Then re-read it, colored pen in hand, looking for typos and infelicitous phrases (a/k/a clunky writing). Some writers read their work aloud. I have no patience for this, and find it unnecessary in the case of simple sentences, like " 'I think the dragon's gall bladder is on the left side,' Mordred said." When there are more complicated paragraphs and longer sentences, I read each word aloud in my mind rather than simply skimming. Doing so usually helps me find the bits that readers will stumble over. Fix the problems you find.

If you don't already know someone who writes, or at least has excellent taste in the genre you're writing, you'll need to find someone who fits that profile and is willing to read your literary offspring. It's no use asking your best friend or a close relative to do it (unless your friend/relative happens to be J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or Anne Rice). A critique group is also a possibility.

After you've evaluated your reader's comments and decided whether they're valid, fix the problems. Sample comments: "Dude, it's physically impossible to fire 150 rounds from a Glock 17 in 75 seconds, even if you've got 10 spare, loaded magazines with you." "If you write entirely in the old Lowland Scots dialect, you need to provide a glossary."

Make sure your formatting is readable and generally acceptable. Times New Roman font is easy to read and pretty standard. Avoid weird fonts except for short, special effects—for a ransom note, perhaps, or when you show a character typing the end of her article/story/novel on her old non-electric Remington as The End.

Make sure your formatting meets the guidelines of the publisher to whom you intend to submit your book. Self-publishing sites will have their own rules. My publisher has an extensive guide to their requirements. Read the rules, understand them, and follow them.

If you're self-publishing, you may be ready to publish.

If you hope to submit to a big, mainstream publisher, you'll almost certainly need an agent, which means researching to find an agent who represents books like yours. Once you've identified a possible agent, read his/her instructions for submitting a query letter. Read the rules, understand them, and follow them. Don't expect the first agent to accept you.

If you're submitting to a small, independent publisher, their website will tell you if you can submit directly, without an agent. If that's the case, read their instructions. They will almost certainly want a query letter from you with a synopsis of your book. Make sure this letter and the synopsis are free of typos and grammatical errors.

NEXT: How do you write a novel? Part III: The Query Letter, and What Comes After 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash