The final step in the novel process is submitting your manuscript to agents and editors. Writers are divided on which you should start with – finding an agent or finding an editor.

Reasons to Find an Agent First

• An agent can function as your first “acceptance” of your book. If you can get an agent to like it enough to represent you, you’re one step closer to getting it published.
• An agent will sometimes work with you on changes to make your book better.
• Agents are better connected in the publishing world and can put your manuscript in front of the editors best positioned to buy it.

Reasons to Find a Publisher First

• Agents can take a long time to respond to a query or a full or partial manuscript, the same as a publisher. By going straight to a publisher, you may shorten the time to acceptance.
• Your position in approaching an agent is stronger when you’ve got a publisher already interested in your book.

Regardless of which you choose, the important thing is that you are submitting your work to somebody.

Finding a Place to Submit Your Novel

There are many places you can check to find agents or publisher to submit your novel to. Here’s a short list of places to start:

• Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market by Writer’s Digest Books
• Writer’s Market Guide to Literary Agents by Writer’s Digest Books
• Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents by Jeff Herman fromPrima Press
• Writer’s Handbook by The Writer, Inc
• Writer’s Digest Magazine
• The Writer Magazine
• Mystery Writers of America
• Science Fiction Writers of America
• Horror Writers Association
• Romance Writers of America
• Literary Market Place

Your novel is now polished and as pefect as it can be. Congratulations! You’ve now accomplished more than 99%* of the people in the world who say they want to be a writer.

You’re ready for the final step in the process – submitting your novel to someone who will read it, love it, and agree to represent or publish it.

Compared to the other steps in the process – planning, writing, revising – this step is the easiest. All you do is locate some people to send it to and put the manuscript in the mail. That’s a lot less effort than the weeks or months it took you to write the book.

However… while submitting is the physically easiest step in the novel writing process, it’s also the most emotionally difficult for most writers. Why? Because you send your novel out to an agent or an editor and then you wait. And wait. And wait. And then wait some more. And if, by a miracle, you get an answer in a reasonable amount of time (anything less than six months), chances are it is a rejection.

You pour your heart and soul into your book and then someone says, “No thanks, not right for us.” Ack! Stabbed in the heart! Many writers experience anxiety, depression, despair, anger or sadness during the submission process because of the high rate of rejection.

The most important thing you can do for yourself on the submission step is to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally.

Yes, your novel is going to get rejected. Expect it. Prepare for it. And remember one very important thing – rejection of your novel is not a rejection of YOU. It’s not personal. How could it be? The agent or editor doesn’t know you. They have your name and your manuscript, not your life history, not a sense of who you really are.

Rejection is a rather harsh term with a lot of negative associations. It is better for a writer to think of it not as a rejection, but as a “Not right for us” message.

Imagine you’re shopping in an art store. You see a piece of modern art on the wall. A lovely piece, but your taste runs toward Impressionist art, so you pass it by. You reject it. Do you hate the artist? No. Do you feel anything personal toward the artist at all? Hardly. That piece of art just didn’t fit your needs or your tastes at the moment.

It’s the same with a writing rejection. It’s not personal, so read the rejection letter, stick it in a drawer and send the manuscript out again. Somewhere out there is the perfect agent or editor for your novel.

*All statistics are made up by me. Hey, I’m a writer, not a numbers gal.

You’ve celebrated and your novel has had a vacation. Time to get back to work on it. The next task is revision, also known as editing or rewriting.

Yes, we all want to think that we write perfect prose in our first draft, but that doesn’t happen. Your writing can always be improved. And there are many methods for doing the rewriting, but they all come down to the same basic steps.

1. Read through the manuscript and note problems.
2. Fix the problems.

Personally, I like a little more guidance than that when starting a task that can be huge. If you feel the same, here are some methods that you can use to guide you.

Revision Methods

How to Revise a Novel from Holly Lisle

One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle from Holly Lisle

Editing by Paperback Writer

Writing Triage by Paperback Writer

Editing and Revising That Won’t Drive You Crazy by Paperback Writer

Self-Editing by Lori Handeland

Editing Made Easy by Lee Masterson

Rewriting the Beast by Lazette Gifford

In a Revision Rut? Try 52-Card Pickup by Carol J. Stephenson

Color My Revisions by Carol J. Stephenson

Autumn Leaves: A Writer’s First Novel Rewrite by Jennifer Shafer

Yes, there are a lot of links and they are only a fraction of the info available on revisions. That’s because revising your novel is a personal process just like the other aspects of writing. You need to figure out what method works for you and use it. Trying out another writer’s process let’s you see if any parts of it will work for you.

If you already have a revision process that works for you, share the details in a comment.

You’ve finished your first draft. Congratulations!

Step One – Put It On Ice

The first thing you should do now is put your novel away for a while. At least a week, but the longer the better, so a month or two is nice. Why? Because the next step is to revise your novel and you need some distance from it.

Right after you’ve finished your novel, you are deep into your story. You know your characters, your plot events… The story and the characters are perfect in your mind.

But in reality, your novel could use some work. Nobody writes a perfect first draft. Experienced writers or people with a huge amount of raw talent may be able to write a cohesive, exciting story with fully-developed characters, building tension and just the right amount of pacing to keep the reader turning the pages in their first draft of the story. But it isn’t perfect and yours won’t be either.

So put your novel away for a while. Let it take a good long nap.

Step Two – Celebrate

It’s time to party! No matter what shape your story is in, when you have reached the end of it, you should take the time to acknowledge your accomplishment. Lots of people SAY they want to write a book. Very few actually manage to get it done. So Yay for you!

A few suggestions for how to celebrate:

• Have dinner at your favorite restaurant.
• If you have a day job, take a vacation day just for yourself.
• Treat yourself to a new book or journal.
• Download some new songs for your MP3 player to inspire your writing.
• Get a massage, a manicure, a pedicure or some other pampering ritual.
• Post about it on your blog.
• Get together with your friends or writing group.
• Create a scrapbook page or collage to mark the day.

Whatever you do, do something special and memorable for you.

After you’re done celebrating and the story is done resting, it’s time to get back to work and start the revision. We’ll cover some different methods you can use to revise your novel in the next post.

You have your characters, you have some plot events, either written down or loosely in your mind. It’s time to start writing your novel.

But I can hear you asking, what about dialogue and pacing, theme, point of view? Those are important, yes, but not right now.

I use my first draft as an opportunity to explore my story world and characters. To understand them, to see if any new ideas for conflict or story events arise. I don’t worry about matters of craft, like dialogue, pacing, theme, point of view, etc. If I tried to keep all of those in mind while writing the first draft, I’d be paralyzed and no words would come out.

No, if you’re a beginning writer, use your first draft to get the story down on paper, nothing more. You can work on the craft stuff while you’re editing your novel. Eventually, when you’ve written enough words in your writing career, you’ll naturally include good dialogue, proper pacing, and most effective point of view in your first drafts.

First Draft Tips

• Write every day. You want to develop a consistent habit.
• Write in small chunks of time, like 10-20 minutes. If you’re pressed for time, keep your story materials handy and write in five minute bursts. The key to making short bursts work is to write as fast as you can in your session.
• No editing! Don’t go back to change anything. If you have a new idea that changes something you’ve already written, make a note somewhere (like your novel journal) and fix it later. You don’t want to lose your forward momentum.
• Don’t worry about clunky writing or dull words. You aren’t trying to write the perfect story, this first time around. You’re exploring the story world and characters and getting the basic story down on paper.

Looking for a program that will provide some encouragement for regular, fast writing? Try the Need for Speed mini course.

We’ve determined that the plot of your novel is the series of events that occur and lead your main character to the conclusion.

There are lots of resources to help you with your plotting. Let’s start with one of the most common – the various lists of basic plots like these.

One of the best things I’ve learned as a writer is that all of these lists are not plots. (Thank you, Holly Lisle!) They’re conflicts or dramatic situations. Take man vs. nature. Man vs. nature is a type of conflict. It certainly isn’t a series of events which we’ve determined makes a plot.

You can use these conflicts in your story as starting ideas for specific scenes and events however, so they are useful.

But for specific plotting help, it’s nice to have some guidelines.

Plotting Resources

Learn How To Create A Professional Plot Outline -This is the mini-course from Holly where she explains how to use the lists of conflicts to create plot events.

Holly also has an ebook out, Create a Plot Clinic, that gives you a bunch of tools to use for plotting. You can get the first few chapters for free here.

Novel Outlining 101 by Lynn Viehl

Outline Your Novel in 30 Minutes by Alicia Rasley

How to Plot Your Novel by Simon Haynes

Plotting Your Novel by Stella Cameron

The Three Act Structure by Stephen J. Cannell – this is a screenwriting method that many writers adapt for use on novels

Try one of these methods for plotting or several. What works for you on one novel might not work on the next, so don’t be afraid to try different techniques as needed.

Do you have any plotting methods that have worked really well for you?

You’ve got a character or two, you might have an idea for your setting, or a really great event to start your story with. Next, you need a plot.

Plot is the series of events in your novel that lead to the ending.

My favorite definition for plot is that it is “what happens to people”. A story about a person sitting alone, doing nothing, thinking nothing isn’t much of a story. Something needs to happen to that person, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. There has to be a change of some kind, otherwise your story is static.

In general, you can consider plot to be the series of events that happen throughout your book that your character either causes or must respond to. The events can be mental or cerebral like many literary books. Or they can be world-ending disasters and violent upheavals like in a thriller, scifi or fantasy novel. They can be emotional as two people work toward a lasting relationship, as in a romance novel. Or they can be a mixture of all of these.

The common thread is that things are happening and changing.

So, for your story, you need events. There are two schools of thought about plotting in the writing community – the plotters vs. the pantsers.

The first group, the plotters, believe in planning out the story events before writing the first draft. The second group, the pantsers, believe in just setting down and writing whatever comes to mind.

There are pros and cons to each method and neither one of them is the definitive correct method you should use. You should use the one that works for you. The only real difference between them is whether the plotting is done before you start writing or if you do it while you are writing.

For some guidelines on trying each method, check out Plotters vs. Pantsers – Which is Better?

You’ve got some characters and now you need some events. My next post will give you some different plotting resources that you can use to come up with those events.

Another way to begin a novel is with an idea for a setting. This is probably a method that is not widely used by writers (hmm… good idea for a survey), but it can work just as well as the other methods (Get a Character, Imagine an Idea).

Settings that Inspire

The trick here is to locate a setting that inspires you with a story idea. Depending on the genre you write there are many different options for finding an interesting setting. This is one area where the Internet can come in really handy.

Science Fiction/Fantasy Art

Jesse van Dijk has some amazing artwork on his site.

Other 3D Lands has artwork to browse and three collections set up as 2009 calendars for ongoing inspiration throughout the year.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Art – you may have to search a little here to find just landscape type pictures, but there is a LOT to choose from.

Landscape Art

For less exotic landscapes, try Art by Wagner for galleries divided by landscape type (gardens, deserts, mountains, paths, etc.).

Linda Vu has some gorgeous beach and ocean-front paintings.

Beautiful pictures of New Zealand landscapes.

Some interesting cityscape photos.

Tips for Using a Setting in Your Story

The same guideline applies here as it did to using an idea as the basis for your story – you have to include the human element. A terrific setting all by itself is going to be pretty static. Insert a character into the setting to bring it to life.

Determine the character’s relationship to the setting. Does he love it? Hate it? Is he in constant conflict with it? (Farmer battling dry ground to wrest a crop from it. Woman struggling to climb a mountain to reach something on the other side.)

Is the setting open or closed? Can the character leave the setting when he chooses? What are the consequences of leaving? (Imagine a life raft on the ocean. The character can choose to leave, i.e. jump overboard, but there will be consequences, i.e. possible drowning or maybe shark attack.)

Your Turn

Have you ever started a story idea with a setting? How did it work for you?

There are other ways to start a novel than with a character. Sometimes you get a great idea for an event or a situation for a novel, but with no idea who the characters will be.

For example, I once had a story idea about a personal computer falling in love with its user. By itself, it’s just an idea. You need to add details to it to make it into a story. Who was the user? Why was he/she worthy of being loved? How did the computer gain consciousness and develop feelings? Ideas by themselves are plentiful and nearly worthless. Ideas that have been developed with concrete details are priceless.

What If?

A good way to come up with story ideas from situations is to use “What If” thinking.

• What if an ignored girl became invisible one day after years of not being seen by others?
• What if there was an overcrowded world where the entire adult population committed mass suicide, leaving the world and its resources to their children? (I actually wrote this one.)
• What if there was a supercomputer that controlled a country’s defenses and it refused to act when war broke out? What if it forced the people to prove they were worthy of being protected?

How to Use an Idea Effectively

The trick to using an idea/situation as the basis of a story is to add the human element to it. Who is most affected by this situation? Who stands to gain from it? Who will lose because of it? You tailor your situation to a set of particular characters and suddenly, you have a story.

In the case of the second example above (the overcrowded world), I wrote the story from the perspective of the eldest child of a family on that world on the night before the adults implemented their plan to save their world and provide for their children’s future.

The son wanted to leave the planet because there was no future for him, no opportunity for him to find meaningful work due to the overcrowding and diminishing resources. His parents refused to let him leave because in their culture, home was everything. That night they committed suicide with all of the other adults and in the morning, the son found a new world with renewed resources and much work to be done. In his grief and shock, he finally understood his parent’s insistence on the value of home and took on the responsibility of staying.

The human element to the idea is in the details – a specific boy who is affected by the adults’ plan, a particular culture that values home so highly that the adults are willing to take drastic action to provide for their children’s future.

Benefit of Using an Idea to Start a Story

The benefit to starting with an idea is that you practically have your “elevator pitch” already done. Your “elevator pitch” is a sentence or two describing your story, short enough that you could recite it within 10-15 seconds (the time a short elevator ride might take). Your What If statement can serve as your elevator pitch, though it may need some tweaking to add in some of those specific details.

Moral of the Story (or Idea)

You can start a story with an idea rather than a character. Just make sure that you round out that idea by identifying specific characters who will be affected by it.

Writing a novel is a noble undertaking. And a lot of work. A lot more than most people realize. But if it is your dream and desire to write a novel, then good for you! We’re going to cover the basics of writing a novel to help you out.

Big caveat to keep in mind: While there are some generally accepted standards for novels (romance novels are about a romantic relationship between two people, novels have a beginning, middle and end, etc.), there really are no rules for a novel. Every writing “rule” has been broken by some writer somewhere.

It’s good to learn the rules, so you can break them on purpose (to achieve a particular effect with your novel, perhaps). Breaking rules because you don’t even know that the “rules” exist isn’t going to get you very far as a writer.

So, rather than rules, we’ll talk about guidelines. The first guideline is to get a Character.

A Great Character

A novel usually has at least one character, though that character doesn’t have to be human (look at all the children’s books with animals as the main character) or even alive (vampire fiction, anyone?) A character gives your reader someone to cheer for or root against, and you want your reader to be involved in your story.

A Cast of One or Thousands

You can have one character or a few thousand. Though a thousand would be a lot to keep track of and all those people might confuse your reader. (Was that Mary With the Bad 80′s Perm who wanted to marry Jimmy the Grocer’s Delivery Boy or was it Mary With the Desperately Sad Attraction to Polyester Clothing? Neither, it was Carrie the Bungee-Jumping Goth who had the crush on Timmy the Geek With the Velvet-Lined Pocket Protector.)

Good, Bad or Really Bad

Your character can be sympathetic (a hero), a necessary evil (an anti-hero), or the worst villain to ever live. What you want is a character that your reader cares about. It doesn’t matter if the reader wants to see your character roast in a dark pit of burning napalm (which could be the villain or the hero, if your reader is a bit twisted). Wanting the character to roast means that your reader “cares” and that’s what you want. If your reader doesn’t care, they’ll set your book down quickly and move on to something that does engage their emotions.

So, the first ingredient for your novel… a character that your reader can really love or really hate.