So what should you do when you finish a manuscript? Sure it has potential, but like a diamond in the rough, unless the author undertakes the very hard next steps to polish and refine it, they will find themselves in a state of confusion when it is rejected out of hand over and over again. But the cold hard truth is that first draft you’ve worked so hard on is probably terrible in every sense. If writers could just write and write and write, we would be the happiest people on earth. So accepting that you’re not impartial, but then assuming you can make yourself impartial, is most likely false. Our puny human brain will swear the outward pointing line is longer-and it doesn’t matter if we measure it and prove they are the same, our brain sees what it sees. To illustrate her point, she shares a familiar image of two parallel lines identical in length, but one has angles pointing inward at the tips, the other pointing outward. In her Happiness Lab lecture series, Yale professor Lori Santos claims “knowing is not half the battle”, meaning we may know something to be true but still not accept it. Don’t get me wrong, their sincerity is not in question-it’s their ability to be impartial and have a critical eye. If you’re new to writing-you might actually believe these early readers which can lead to an ego-jarring let down when you send it out to agents. Friends who have never written a fictional sentence in their life (besides their dating profiles) think you’re a wizard. And then comes a compulsive need to have someone read it-to share it with a best friend, spouse, or parent, and it’s with great excitement you wait for the accolades to roll in. You want to dance around the room and shout out your victory at having wrested the plot into a coherent tale from the tangled web of thoughts that bounced around your head. A sort of tingling joy runs through you, a sense of euphoria that the mountain of doubts and fear have been conquered. If you’re an author, you know that feeling you get when you type these final two words into your manuscript-The End. This month we’re talking about the editing and revision process. Welcome back to The Iron Jaw, a monthly column on the writing life.

Rough draft and final draft example