ISWG: How Do You Know You Are Done?

 

Photo by Kalei de Leon on Unsplash

How do you know you're finished with a manuscript?

I'm in what I think might be the final stretches of editing with my manuscript, so I’ve keep asking myself this question.

Last week I signed up for a webinar "How Do You Know You're Done?", but it ended up being about how do you know when to set your manuscript aside. 

That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I want to know is: When do you know your story is complete? When do you know it’s time to step away? Because we all know that we as writers can fiddle and tweak—and sometimes too much tweaking can just make things worse.

Here are the signs you might be getting close:

1.    You’re changing more minor things: word choice, syntax, and looking at sentence-level type changes.

2.    The story says what you want it to say. 

3.    The character arc works.

4.    The synopsis reads like a story, not a muddled mess.

5.    Your list of what to change has gotten shorter—and are not so many big picture issues.

Photo by alexey turenkov on Unsplash

 

When I draft, I feel like I’m writing in the dark with a flashlight that’s running low on batteries. Right now, it’s like I finally see the figure in the marble (to borrow Michelangelo’s metaphor). It might still have some rough edges, but there’s something there.

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material. (attributed to Michelangelo)

 

Photo by Val Vesa on Unsplash

Even though I see these signs, I still waver. What if I’m wrong?

For many years, I didn’t query until I’d had the rubber stamp of approval from a critique partner. 

Now, although I still get critiques, I don’t depend on them as much to tell me when my work is ready.

I wait till I know it’s ready. Recently, I was talking about this with a friend, and she told me her brother says, “You just know.” And that sounds about right.

My hope is that my manuscript will be ready-ready in a few months. But it’s been at least seven years since I sent a book length manuscript into the world. 

Yes, I'm one of those. A slow writer.

What about you? How do you know your manuscript is ready to be seen by people outside your critique group/partners/family? How do you know you’re done?

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