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Dissonance, a Novel
by Lisa Lenard-Cook
Buy This Book via Amazon.com

I'll bet if you're a mad dash to the finish type, you didn't put your manuscript away as I suggested last month. Instead, as soon as your marathon read-through (see my November 2005 column) was over, you ran to your laptop and started typing in your edits and notes.

When I discouraged you from this last month, I told you that your right brain needed time to mull the big picture things you learned about your fiction. If you leap straight from read-through to laptop, you lose this all-important percolation period.

Percolation: The Key to Success

What happens during this period is so important to the overall success of your book that if you skip it, chances are your book will never move from okay to outrageous. Here are just a few of the things right brain will notice that left brain likely won't.

1. Dumb mistakes. You may have changed a character's name and done a global search and replace, but if that name was misspelled, or a nickname was used, S&R won't find it—and you won't see it— without some time away from the manuscript. Ditto homonyms (there, their, they're; its, it's; to, too, two). Even those of us who know the differences among these words make these mistakes, especially if we type fast. And ditto the wrong word entirely: Some of my own errors in this department have made me laugh out loud (but, thankfully, no one else—because I [mostly] caught them.) A month away from a manuscript means rested eyes that are more likely to notice such booboos.
2. Continuity errors. I've read far too many published books where characters move impossibly from place to place, time to time, or worse, die on one page only to be mysteriously revived on the next. These books are most often by bestselling authors and so are rushed into print without proper editing, so both author and editor are at fault here. But—and here's the thing—these authors' first books (the ones that propelled them to bestseller status) didn't have such errors. If they had, they never would have been published. So it's up to you to make sure a character who's in a house in Kansas on one page doesn't end up in Oz on the next. (Okay: Bad example. Just making sure you're paying attention.)
3. Superfluous scenes. We all write them. In fact, they're often the best scenes we'll ever write. But sometimes, they don't belong in the book. If you've put your book in the closet for a month or more, you'll see this much more clearly. You don't need to throw these scenes away, but you do need to get them out of a manuscript where they don't belong. You know the ones I mean. You hope an editor will love them as much as you do and so want them in there even though they don't belong. Not gonna happen. Get them out. Now.
4. Missing scenes. Narrative is not scene. Alluding to the murder that's the key to your book in a narrative sentence such as, "Later, when Larry learned Laura had killed Lance with a lariat, he laid the law on her," kills your chances of being published faster than Laura's lariat. There is no substitute for a necessary scene. None. If you can't write a particular scene, whether because it's too close to your heart, too gory, too sexy, or too difficult, you are writing the wrong book.
   

But! But! But!

Sorry, no buts allowed. (I almost typed "aloud," which would have made a butt of me.) That said, here are my rebuttals to your buts.

If you're still enraptured by your story, can't get your characters out of your head, wake up wanting to write more, or otherwise want to continue to climb back inside your fiction, the message is that you did your marathon read-through prematurely. Fictions that aren't close to being finished are the ones that wake us up in the middle of the night. Fictions that need to percolate in right brain will leave us alone.

The difference between cleaning up a close-to-finished manuscript and fixing a broken one comes back to understanding the art of fiction. Here, we arrive full circle, back to the first year's worth of columns I wrote for Authorlink, columns that explored everything from your fiction's origins to character, plot, setting, point of view, pacing, and voice. If you haven't mastered these basics, their lack with be apparent in your draft. If you have, you'll know when a manuscript needs to spend more time in your closet before it's ready for a re-look.

Right now, I have four manuscripts in my own closet, each needing a something more I haven't yet discerned. In other words, even writers who've grasped the basics know it takes time for a fiction to reveal itself—not just the time it takes to write it the first time, but the time for what's hidden between the words to reveal itself. And that, finally, is why you don't want to dash madly to the finish: You may miss the most important thing you'll ever write, the heart of the matter, the thing that compelled you to begin in the first place.

This fall, I'll be devoting a column to your questions. If you have a nagging question about the craft of writing, email me in care of the editor-in-chief of Authorlink at dbooth@authorlink.com. About
Lisa Lenard-Cook