Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie Part 7

Post Production

Once a film is shot the producers, director and editor are left with a stack of memory cards or cans of film. Your cans of film are your first and hopefully second draft of your novel. Now it’s time to stitch everything together as perfectly as possible. This means crafting your scenes so they flow logically and seamlessly into each other. It means placing your plot points and yes/no reversals in their proper strategic places. It means having your ending go off like a fireworks show.

You are really playing the role of the film editor. Your work in this phase should be easier than the previous production and pre-production tasks. All of the heavy lifting is done. Your hard work is now paying off resulting in a polished, well executed and professional manuscript (and cover). From the blocking and lighting process your scenes have a unique feel to them that other writers may try to emulate but will only be able to approximate. You have not only defined the tone, color and tempo of your novel but now have a recognizable style. Your emerging style, or voice, is now distinct from other writers.

Do not over-edit your manuscript. There’s a difference between polished and slick. Polished is professional, slick is contrived. So where do you stop? This is where a checklist comes in handy. Here’s a basic one I use:

• Do your scenes flow evenly and logically from one to another?
• Does your manuscript adhere to the three-act structure?
• Are the first act plot points located in the right spots and in the right order?
• Does your second act contain true yes/no reversals opposed to being sloppy filler to get to the third act?
• Does your third act knock it out of the park?
• Is your book cover professional and competitive with other covers in your genre?

If you can honestly answer yes to the checklist questions then you have written a pretty good book that people will want to read. Now it’s time to get it into readers hands. For more on that, check out the April 15, 2012 blog post eBooks: Five Bucks Max for a analysis of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing.

This is the final post in the Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie series. As you can tell, we like movies, long and short, pro and amateur, big budget extravaganzas and micro-budget shorts. We will be extending an invitation to filmmakers in May to shoot scenes or book trailers from the John Silver books and are working out the details now.