12 Ways to Take a New Look at Your Book

Looking for ways to push your book across the finish line? Try one or more of these methods.

Once you have a complete, or near complete, draft of your book, try any of these methods to help you take a deeper look at your material. If the sparks stop flying late in the game you might need to jump start your progress towards the homestretch. The best way forward is to get good readers to give feedback. If you can’t, you need to do something to trick your mind into looking at the material as ‘new’. Things that blow away the blindness of being too close to the content. Things that also help you see it as the reader will see your work. Hopefully, after doing one of more of these ‘sanity checks’ of your work, you’ll again see the way forward and make progress quickly. Taking a systematic approach to evaluating your book ‘as a whole’ always brings rewards. It forces you to look at pace, identify gaps, and be creative about your story ‘yet again’. This is how the reader will experience your book — from start to end. The point of all of these tips is to consider the entire book at once. Once you exhaust these ‘new looks’ and feel you have nothing to change, you are truly done (until you look again, that is). If you try one or more of these ‘creative tricks’ and you easily finish it and feel deeply satisfied with the outcome, it’s a good sign you are ready to publish.

Tell someone the story of your book verbally.

It is surprising how much it helps to just tell your story in spoken words. You’ll add emotion. You’ll pick to stress certain things and drop others. This is very telling. Some passages lend themselves well to long descriptive passages that are hard to describe verbally. Other parts of the action are very easy. You’ll start to feel the pace of your book when you do this. You might even pick up new twists to the story, remember details you have to add, or identify gaps. If there is no one around tell yourself. Rehearse and rehearse. You might be surprised what pops out of your mouth that has never occurred to your fingers when writing or typing.

Play out your book in your mind like a movie.

How would it translate? When you have to visualize each scene you have to place it in a real environment. You might find some flat parts that have no action. You might start to see your characters so vividly you see new or better scenes to add. Think visually. If you had to paint 10 paintings from your book what scenes would they be? If you don’t paint, which photographs would you take? If you have no artistic leaning at all, which scenes would you want a professional artist to take the time to render visually for you? Why are you picking those images? What do they mean? Are they spread evenly throughout the book or do they come in patches? What does the collection of images say about your book? Are they all faces of characters? Are they the climax moments of scenes of special importance? Are they deeply emotional moments felt by one or more of your characters? Are they of objects of symbolic or practical important? Was it easy to pick out the top 10 images or was it difficult? Readers form images in their minds while reading books. What will your readers be thinking?

Look at the openings and closings of each chapter.

We often get lost in the details. The opening and ending of each chapter should be as strong as the beginning and conclusion of the whole book. Checking each ending for how it relates to the opening of the next chapter is equally important. Just like checking the openings and endings of each chapter, you can look at the opening and end paragraphs of each paragraph. As you do this you can look to put the weight of each sentence at the end where it has more impact.

Summarize each paragraph, then each section. Do the same for chapters. Even, do it for the book. This is what belongs on the back cover!

Your manuscript should be like a perfectly carved set of Russian Dolls. Each doll fitting into the larger doll beautifully, from words to sentences on up. The more dolls you have the more exquisite the set. At the lowest level, go through your chapters and write down what each paragraph is about. Do this quickly. Circle or mark the best parts of each paragraph. Are your circles sparse or so dense you can’t see what you wrote? You are writing out the story in shorthand so you can check the higher order patterns. Likelihood is, you’ll see new arcs. You are also checking that each paragraph says something new. If you can’t quickly figure out what the paragraph is about, delete it. If you essentially say the same thing again in more than one paragraph, pick the best of breed and delete the rest. Often you will find a paragraph that contains more than one idea. This means you should split it into two paragraphs as great paragraphs are focused on one topic.

Make a final outline.

If you didn’t start with an outline for your book, try to make one now. Hopefully, you’re such a good writer that it jumps out at you. Having a good outline means you have a solid, logical and well-thought out book. If you have a fast-paced story that has all its parts in place, this will be very easy to do. If you started from an outline, just do it again to see if anything changed. Few writers stick to an original outline and it will be insightful to see where you deviated and think about why.

Decide on what you think the reader will remember most.

Sit by yourself somewhere quite different from where you usually write and write down all the most memorable moments of your book. What you do think a reader will take with them if they finish the book? What do you want them to take away from the book? The best books contain something that a reader can remember for a year, a decade or even a lifetime. What are your points? Do you make enough of them? Write down all your best scenes in rank order. They should come spilling out of you if you are close to done and your book has true substance. If you have to think too long or none stand out as ‘favourites’ you have more work to do. You should be dying to get these scenes in front of readers because you know they are so good. If a few pop out, great! Think hard about why you like those so much and try to edit the rest of the book to meet that gold standard. In a related vein, think about which passages you would pick for a book reading and why. If you don’t have a bunch to chose from, get writing.

Check your book’s emotional cues to the reader.

This is like making an ‘emotional script’ to the book, or an ‘outline based on feelings’. Think about how you expect the reader to feel at each part of your book. What trajectories do you send them on? How well have you paved the way for them? Are there clear road signs? How much ambiance have you created? Go through the book and make a note of whether the reader should feel happy, sad, lost, etc. Write down what they should think about each of your characters and any of the actions. Should they be rooting for this character and hating another because you are going to kill him off in the next chapter? Look to make the peaks and twists of the story more riveting. If a married character is going to reveal she’s having an affair, make sure the reader thinks until then she is happily married.

Change your ending.

This is not about changing your story, or throwing your ending away and starting over. It’s about solidifying your current story by comparing it against other possible endings. Get a piece of paper and write down at least 10 alternative endings for your book. It’s just a thought experiment. Do more if you can. The more outlandish the ending the better. Then evaluate them against the one you have. Try to figure out what you would need to change in your current version of the story to make each ending work. This will give you a new view of everything from your characters, to their environment, to the action.

Take each of your chapters in the book and drop them out one by one.

What happens to the rest of the plot? Does removing a chapter break the story? Good if so, it contains essential information for the plot. If not, you should seriously consider dropping the chapter. You can repeat this for subsections, or even for paragraphs, although it can be harder to decide at that level of detail. You can also repeat this for each character. Is the presence of each one justified in terms of the plot? In another twist on this, flip each chapter. Especially see what happens if you flip chapter 2 for chapter 1. Do you get rid of unnecessary back story and let the action rip? What happens when you flip other chapters? If they are in correct order, and all needed, you shouldn’t be able to flip any of them without major disruptions (although there could be some exceptions).

Draw your book’s structure in various ways — i.e. create a summary of key aspects of your book on a single page of paper.

These are essential sanity checks you can do. Do new patterns emerge that you hadn’t seen before? Is the image easy to draw or are there still questions to answer? Think of the kinds of images authors might place inside the book flap. Is a map relevant? Draw it and think about what you are putting where on the map and why. Is the timeline without flaw? Draw a chronological image of your story marking dates and main events. You may jump around in time, through flashbacks or foreshadowing of the future. Make sure, if you are jumping around in time that the motivations of the characters match the time they are acting in. Make sure all time spans are reasonable and logical. Imagine you wanted to give the reader a summary of your characters at a glance. What would it look like? Draw a family tree or make a looser network of all the characters. Try putting your central characters in the middle and the more peripheral characters to the edges. Who is linked with whom and why? Are you equally happy with all the characters? Should you add or drop any? Do they all help to progress the plot in some way?

Check the links.

Take the ending of the book and go through the book from the start and ask how each chapter (section, paragraph, character) helps to get you to that ending. If you can’t tell how it does, it is extra to the story and should be removed. Then start at the end of the book and tell the story backwards. If the ending is “Z”, it should come about because of previous circumstances “Y”, that hinge on “X”, that are only possible because of “W” and so forth to “A”, the first action in the chronological timeline of the book. Are you compelled backwards at each point or do you have to search for the link? A great plot will be like a chain — all the links will be tightly bound together. Of course, often the more surprising and unusual the links, the better, but they also need to be believable.

If you have the luxury of time, stop and write something different.

This might not help you directly, but it will refresh your mind. If you chose to write in a very different style it might just awaken new skills or get certain things out of your system. After a while, come back to the book and you’ll be able to look at it more objectively. Irrelevant details will fade to the background and you’ll see the chaff more easily. The themes and action points will gel in your mind and you’ll focus on them more. Don’t be afraid to throw paragraphs, sections, or even chapters away. Often what you need to do is distil — this means rewriting just keeping the best parts and raising the stakes to a higher level. The main point of including this very obvious method that is known to all writers is that if you’ve done one or more of the earlier methods before you put the book away, you’ll now know exactly what to do.