Kill Your Darlings, and Some Trees

So you've written the first draft of your novel! Now what?

Most writers will tell you to put it in a drawer for a week or month, to spend some time apart from it before you return to the manuscript with fresh eyes for the first round of revision. That's great advice, but I'm going to take it one step further and say you should literally put the manuscript in a drawer. For that you need a physical copy of it, which means I'm telling you to print the darned thing out. That's right. All of it. On paper.

What? But that's so wasteful! Those poor trees.

There are always studies that suggest reading on paper is different from reading on a screen. Makes sense to me. I think many of us have become accustomed to skimming websites and social media updates and blog posts (I bet some of you are doing it right now!), which means our brains are now trained to not look at text too closely on screens. There's also something less permanent about something we see on the screen versus a hard copy before us, and so I think we treat words on the screen less critically. Science tells us that creative writing is a left brain activity, while critical thinking and editing is a right brain thing. It seems that it might be helpful to distinguish those activities more -- such as by only writing your novel on your computer but editing it on paper. At least, this helps me. I'm the guy who prints everything I'm line editing or revising at work, from e-mails to manuals. Maybe that's wasteful, but I consider it part of the cost of business, like my salary; my job is to catch and fix mistakes, and I notice more on paper than I do staring at a screen, especially subtle changes in font size and spacing.

The first draft of my first novel, FAIR COIN. Much more impressive than a file on my computer!

Aside from all this scientific and anecdotal support for printing and editing on paper, personally I also simply like seeing that stack of paper. After months at the keyboard, a word count is still pretty abstract. Do you know what 80,000+ words looks like? Seeing my novel on actual pages feels like more of an accomplishment, and whether it gets published or not, it's now a physical thing in the real world which I made. Those printed pages also make it look more like a finished book, which is exciting and also helps me put some distance between something I wrote and something I'm reading.

(Note that, as most agents now accept electronic submissions, and most publishers send copyedits electronically, chances are unless you print it yourself, you probably will not see your book on paper until you get a galley.)

If I'm editing on screen, I'm mostly tinkering, the same as I would do while drafting -- deleting a word here, moving a sentence there, adding a description. But once I have it on paper, with pen in hand, I can look at the bigger picture. I have no problem putting slashes through entire pages or chapters, rewriting and commenting in the margins, often with helpful notes like "Make this better." Then, when I'm transferring all that back into the file and implementing my edits, I revert to writing mode again.

But like more and more writers today, I don't even own a printer. If I were writing more short stories, I would probably get one, but it doesn't make sense for a novel a year (or less frequently than that, sigh). So what are your options? If you print it at work, you would not be the first writer who has done so. But maybe you can't or don't want to take advantage of office resources, so you take it to Staples or Kinko's. It's going to run you $40 or more to get it printed, and extra if you want any binding to keep the pages together.

I still think that's worth it, but here's a pro tip, specifically from professional middle grade and young adult author Jackson Pearce, who first shared it with me: If you aren't in a hurry (and you aren't, right, since you want to take a break from the book?) print your novel on-demand at Lulu. You can keep it private with a print run of only one, for you, spiral bound or perfect bound or whatever you want. After the experience of shuffling (and dropping) 400 loose pages around (which is worse if you're editing on a subway), even in a binder, I was sold on printing my books this way. (Also, remember to include page numbers!) Not only does it make it all neat and tidy, but it looks even more like a book, and it's very easy to store if, like me, you want to hold onto marked-up print copies of some of your drafts.

How do you tackle reading and revising your manuscript?