MY WRITING PROCESS

How does Jenelle take a book from those first few sentences to a final draft? Well, I've honed and streamlined the process throughout the years, and I'm sure I will continue to hone what I have now in the years to come. However, from writing the first sentences (which come after a lot of the world-building, character constructing, and outlining), to having a completed final draft, here is a little glimpse into my current process.

I tend to edit a lot as I go, so my "rough" draft is already more like a second or third draft by the time it is finished. When the rough draft is complete, I hand it to my content editor - who goes through and gives me editing advice pertaining to content only - story line, whether a character would say or do something, consistency, things like that. I make those changes and hand it to my line-editor for things like grammar/spelling/punctuation, etc.

When I get those changes back, I make the changes and focus on the formatting side of things. (In the future, I am going to move this step in between content and line-editing... told you the process would continue to change!) I get the book formatted and then comb over it a couple of times with the "invisibles" turned on to make sure every new paragraph is tabbed in correctly, and that I don't have any extra spaces anywhere in the manuscript. This is also when I choose fonts for the text and chapter headings, as well as add the segue marks.Then I get a few beta readers - these are people who read the story and make minor comments like, "I don't really believe this character could run 20 miles in 5 minutes..." or "that is not something you can really do in a swordfight..." or "I thought so and so had a broken leg... why is there no mention of the pain he is feeling?" things like that. This is always very useful. The goal throughout this process is to get as many sets of eyes on the book as possible so that there is less of a chance that something glaring gets missed. (There will always be at least one typo... but one typo can be dealt with... it's dozens that are unacceptable).When all that is finished, the book is pretty much complete and ready to be put in a lovely cover and sent off to the printer!

I'd love to hear from other authors on this: What's your process for bringing a book to completion?