Congratulations! You’ve finished your first draft! You deserve a big cigar, glass of champagne or whatever it is you celebrate these things with. Feel free to take a few days or a week off, you’ve earned it.

But then, back to work! You may think that now you’ve thrashed out a first draft, the hard part is over, and you’re reaching the finish line. Afraid not. There’s a whole lot more slog to go. But don’t be disheartened! You’re still further then 80% of people who say they’re going to write a book. Don’t give up!

Most of the large scale structure of your book should be relatively fixed by now – if you planned well, it will mean less serious redrafting is needed (for example cutting out entire chapters of characters), so you can focus on fine tuning.

We’ve already looked at some of the mistakes that will instantly mark you out as an amateur, now let’s take a look at a few aspects of writing that you can perfect to take your writing from mediocre to excellent.

Note - if you're looking for a guide to the various different drafts of a novel, you might be interested in this article.

Have you over explained your characters?

The core of this is the good old ‘show, don’t tell’. Make sure you’re not explaining the character’s personality to your readers, as they’re likely to find it dull and distancing.

Compare:

‘Jane was a slob. She hadn’t tidied up in months.’

‘Jane kicked the mouldy plate off the bed and rummaged around for the least stiff pair of jeans from the piles strewn on the floor.’

In the first example, the author makes a statement about a character, and then backs it up with a little evidence, but they’re still just giving their word. In the second example, the author is keeping out of it, just describing the action and letting the reader draw their own conclusions about the cleanliness habits of Jane.

Also, new writers often feel they need to give the entire life story of a character early on, but this isn’t a good idea. It stalls the action, and anyway, it’s more natural to get to know people in a slower, more gradual way. When you meet someone new, you don’t immediately learn everything about them, that happens over time.

By just giving consistent broad brushstrokes, you allow your reader to use their imagination and fill in the gaps, in many cases creating a character with more layers than even you thought of.

Another useful technique for building character is to use what your character notices to give information about them. When they enter a room, do they notice all the pretty girls; the stains on the carpet; or do they note all the exits and times to reach them? What they notice tells us a great deal about their outlook and priorities.

Is the Point of View clear?

A nice way of thinking about point of view is ‘whose skin are you in?’ 

This doesn’t mean that you need to write your story from the 1^st person (using ‘I’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’), or even that you have to use the same character’s point of view through the whole book (although the latter may not be a bad idea if it’s your first book – learn to walk before you run).

However, it is critical that the reader knows whose point of view they are following in any given scene, and this shouldn’t change within a scene.

This is because changing point of view character within a scene is very disorientating for the reader and it breaks their suspension of disbelief, as they have to mentally adjust.

Writing from a particular character’s point of view is more than just where they are standing; it’s also about what they notice. As mentioned above in the section on characters, different characters will have completely different experiences from exactly the same environment. 

For example, you’d be unlikely to have a teenager commenting on the ancient gothic architecture (unless that’s a strong part of their character), and an old lady might notice a gang of louts hanging on a corner, but have no idea what the gang bands on their arms represented.

Also, remember that you may be able to mind-read the Point of View character even if you’re writing from the third person, but you absolutely cannot read the minds of anyone else (unless your PoV character happens to be psychic), so you’ll have to get across their opinions through what they say, how they say it, actions and body language.

How proportionate is your plot?

How does your prose balance? How much is action, dialogue or description?

In general, no sentence should be included if it isn’t critical to the plot, but this doesn’t mean there’s no time to stop and smell the roses. As long as the roses have some relevance to atmosphere, and they are described in a way that reflects the mood of the scene.

If you’re going to spend a lot of lines describing something, make sure it’s relevant. For example, don’t spend two pages describing the interior of one building and two lines on another, unless the first building is central to the plot. Because you can be sure your readers are going to think it is.

Likewise, if your character is doing something, such as cooking, or fixing a saddle, don’t describe it in too much detail unless it’s important to the plot or builds atmosphere. Just because you find a hobby interesting, doesn’t mean your readers will.

On the other hand, if there’s an action scene which is central to the plot, shows key aspects of a main character and throbs with atmosphere – then break it down into moment by moment detail.

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to follow about how much description to have and how much detail to include in a particular spot – it’s all about balance.

With the second draft in the bag you can see the finish line. It's time for Step 14: Refining the Final Draft of your novel.

For more guidance on novel writing, click here.

 

So how do we make our settings come to life?

How well you can gather detail about your settings depends a lot on your constraints - time and money.

Ideally, you'll immerse yourself in each setting - including in each relevant time of day and season. 

However, this may not be practical (particularly if you're writing a steam punk novel), in which case your imagination will have to pick up the slack.

If you can go to the locations you're going to use as settings, then go - take copious amounts of photographs (which can easily be saved and kept track of with The Novel Factory Novel Software) make reams of notes about everything you can see, smell, taste, feel, hear. Take samples of sand, pebbles, dried leaves - whatever you can. Try to look at the place through the eyes of your characters - what would they notice? What would they ignore?

However, if you can't go there - you'll need to research - and lucky you, you live in the era of the Internet. Get online and find pictures, even videos - of places and buildings that are as close as possible to what you envisioned. Study the pictures and you're guaranteed to find more delicious detail in real life (or some artist's imagination) than you could have come up with on your own.

A quick exercise to prove this if you're so inclined:

Take ten minutes now and write a description of a sweet shop, without doing any research online - no cheating! You know one of those old ones where all the sweets are in jars. Go on, go right ahead and do that.

Done? Now go and spent ten minutes searching for images of these old style sweet shops. Keep the pictures somewhere handy. Now, constantly referring to the pictures, spend another ten minutes on a second description of the sweetshop.

Compare.

And if you like - post your results in the comments.

 

Draw maps and plans

It's hard to overstate how important it is to have floor plans detailing each of the places your characters visit.

Seeing exactly which rooms are adjoining; where the doors and windows are, where they lead and what can be seen through them; what furniture is where - really anchors your characters, rather than giving the impression they're drifting around the space. Having this information will add realistic detail to your story as you will see what in the environment the character can interact with, where they bump into each other and things, how they enter and leave.

 

List the senses

It's time to get analytic about the abstract. Prosaic though it may seem, go through each of your settings and make a list for all of the senses.

• What can you (or better, your point of view character) see?
• What can you smell?
• What can you taste?
• What can you feel?
• What can you hear?

Just make a list. You probably won't use everything on the list. You may use hardly any of it. But when you're writing your scene, you'll have this box of colours, ready to dip into without having to break your flow.

Next - advanced plotting - consistency and clarity

The Novel Formula - A Novel Writing Method: Step Five

Character Viewpoints

This is a really fun step, in which you get inside the skin of your characters, discover if there are any impossibilities in your plot and give the story a level of depth that you just couldn't get by coming at it from your omnipotent author viewpoint.

What you're going to do, is write a synopsis of the story from the point of view of each of the major characters - taking about a page for each. You should let you imagination loose at this point, so don't worry too much if you run over, just don't burn out before you've done them all!

If your story is primarily told from the point of view of the lead character, you will have to be really strict about their synopsis - if you're getting to the point where you have five pages and you're still in the early stages - it's getting out of hand.

Do your best to try to really get into each individual character; speaking as they would speak, noticing what they would notice and even using metaphors that they would. Does your character use a lot of long words or a lot of slang? Do they immediately scope out the decor of a room, the people in it, or the escape routes? Do they use a lot of sporting metaphors or sea ones, or sensory ones?

Personally, I like to imagine the character sitting on a stool in the middle of a room, being asked to explain what happened - but you don't have to do it that way.

Before you write each character story synopsis, make sure you check over the notes you already have to remind yourself of what you've already learned about your character. This will help you keep it consistent and also inspire the synopsis.

The character story synopsis should not tell the entire history of the character, starting when they were a child (unless that's relevant), but should start at the first relevant point to the story. This may, however, be before the story begins for the lead.

Think about what the character is doing in-between encounters with other characters and appearances in the story. You don't have to know every single detail, but they should never vanish from existence.

By doing this sort of synopsis, not only will you get to know your characters better, but you will make them seem much more real, as it forces you to think about what they're doing when they're not in your main narrative. This starts to give them their own lives, and can affect how they behave when they are in the main narrative.

For example, if you haven't thought about what a character has been doing immediately before your lead encounters them, they may tend to be in a neutral mood, and just hanging around doing nothing, or doing something vague. Once you've walked through the story in their shoes though, you might know that they've just had an argument with their sister, or just received a long awaited letter, or simply just stubbed their toe. How will this affect how they receive your lead?

In this way you can add more interesting complications and conflict, adding depth and realism.

So go ahead and get started on your character story synopses.

Click here for the next step in the Novel Formula - extending your synopsis.

If you want the obvious, then you can say that point of view is the perspective from which you view the story. But what does this actually mean.

Well, there are two common writing styles - first person and third person.

In a first person story your point of view is easy. You view the whole story through the eyes of one character. This means that you show everything as it is experienced by your main character. Your main character is the narrator:

I woke up late. I went to the balloon shop. The man in the shop looked at me funny.

In the third person you tell the story at a level removed. You tell the story as an omnipresent narrator that shows the reader the actions of various characters:

John woke up late. He went to the balloon shop. The shop's proprietor gave John a funny look.

The easiest way to write in the third person is to use what is known as 'Third Person Limited'. This is similar to using first person in that the narrator only follows one character.

For the more complicated plot, there is 'Third Person Omniscient'. In this case the story is told from multiple, often conflicting, viewpoints.

When writing in the third person it's easy to get carried away and tell things that the current point of view character couldn't know. The narrator can theoretically tell the reader about anyone and anything. However, in practice this can cause all kinds of confusion for the reader.

As a reader, you want to get into the head of one character at a time, you want to view the world as they view it and sympathise with their point of view. The reader wants to feel their pain and joy. Using multiple viewpoints within a novel is common because there is time enough to get to know more than one person.

However, a general rule of thumb, it's a good idea to stick with one character for the duration of a scene. Switching viewpoints within a scene is a known as head-hopping and can be rather disorientating because the reader doesn't know who they are supposed to be identifying with.

So, that's first and third person - what happened to the second person?

Well, that's you.

Not much fiction gets written in the second person because it can feel quite intrusive and strange:

Like that time when you woke up late. You went to the balloon shop. The man in the shop gave you a funny look.

It's tolerable in a short section, but can you imagine a whole novel informing you of the things you'd supposedly done? There's always the temptation to think: No I didn't. I wouldn't do that.

Well, don't look at me; I didn't do it and it must have been one of us.

Read more creative writing articles here.