Steve was right!

I was a little surprised when I found out that Steve sometimes doesn't read the entire book manuscript that he is editing. He told me that he does this for some manuscripts, not only because of time constraints, but he can also know what the draft is like just by reading the first 20-30 pages. Of course I believed him, but I wondered if it was just a Steve thing, something that he has acquired the ability to do because of his long experience in book publishing. But, now I can say from my experience that Steve was right about this!

As I was working on my second manuscript review, I realized that for both times of doing a review and just reading the drafts for Author Days, I pretty much grasp in the first 20-30 pages the core aspects of the book that are either good or need improvement. After I set these aspects as my foundation, I pretty much encounter examples throughout the book that fit these aspects. Despite the fundamental flaws that stay throughout the entire manuscript, I have to say that most drafts do get better as they progress. Why is this? I am assuming that it must be pretty difficult to start a draft. Once you are in the midst of an idea, it's easy to write, because the you are swimming in the complexity of that idea, re-arranging its different components as you write them out. But, how do you start about bringing an idea to the table? There might be two big mistakes people make to deal with this problem. They either dumb the idea down for the sake of clarity, because they are afraid that readers won't get it, or the introduction starts off too broadly, vaguely, or with too much complexity crammed into a tiny amount of space. A professor once told me that the introduction is the last thing she writes when she's writing a book. This must be her attempt to start from inside her head and coming out with what her head contains, all wrapped up nicely, instead of opening a door to her own head and being smooshed by an avalanche of her ideas that are trying to burst out.