Why You Should Marinate Your Manuscript

Marinating your manuscript simply means not reading your draft for a long time, say a month? A lifetime? Before reading it again and realizing it is such a huge mess.

It borrows from the concept of marinating foods in which you soak the meat in a combination of oils and spices to add more flavor and to tenderize the food. Apply this in writing and you’ll be surprised at the duplications, redundant phrases, words, fillers, chunks of irrelevant chapters, plotholes, and emotional chapters that cannot even trigger a single tear for a reader.

I read this concept from Robert’s Rules of Writing written by Robert Masello. And I can say that this process really works. My WIP is now on my fifth draft and everytime I finish writing to the end of the chapter, I would just set it aside and discipline myself to never read it. The purpose of this is to strip off the illusion that you have written the best version, because who among us writers think that we have written a garbage right after we’ve finished a whole novel? No one. Yup, no one. For sure we are all overflowing with pride, thinking we already reached the end goal, imagining book signings, interviews, even though we only just written for a short time. Do this, just once, and you’ll change your mind.

Waiting for a long time before you could work on your novel might look unproductive at first sight, but it actually does more magic than continuously working on it. Marinating your manuscript gives you a fresh pair of sight so that you could easily spot the flaws that are hard to see. In my experience, I’ve already killed off a lot of my fictional characters that are not contributing much to the story. Some are replaced with a better background, defined motivations, and actions that does influence the other characters.

Doing this also makes you picky on word choices. If a scene demands action, I’d better use words such as lunged, advanced, side-stepped, rather than bland words like ran, attacked, defended himself. If the scene is dramatic, I make sure that the descriptors show not tell. I limit the passive words and replace those with those that could help the reader visualize.

What you could do to help yourself while waiting for your manuscript be flavorized is reading or writing other stuff, such as blogging. One month hiatus is such a long break for writing and there is that fear that your writing skills may get rusty. Reading other works while on break will surely improve your way of writing. Ask yourself these questions: What did this writer do in getting his book published? What are the specific words that got you hooked in his first paragraph? Why am I still reading this? I am now crying over this character’s situation, how did this writer do that? All these curiosities will eventually be applied once you started working back again on your drafts.

Blogging, on the other hand, helps to divert your attention on the novel you’re writing and sharpen your writing skills at the same time. Not only that, it boosts your online presence, increasing your chances on getting noticed by publishers, or simply raising your credibility that you could actually write. In blogging, there are no limits. You could write about many things. You could market your skills, you could share information about the book you’re currently writing, you could share helpful information, inspiring other writers out there to write their own stories.

So how long should you really wait? There is no standard metric but the most suggested is one month. But this doesn’t mean that two weeks or one week is not allowed. At the end it’s up to you. Just make sure that in between those waits, your mind is somewhere else. Do not even think about your novel, or what plot change you should make on Chapter 14 this coming Saturday. Forget that you’ve written a book for a long time. What you should do is set an alarm or an event in your calendar that would remind you when you should reread your book again. Doing this you’ll feel like another reader reading someone else’s work, you’ll be able to critic your work effectively.

Reminder: just be honest with your reactions. When you encounter trashy phrases, which I’m sure you will, forget what you felt when you’ve first written such words, don’t deny its trashiness, don’t argue to yourself that it worked before. No. Know that you already improved in the long time you’ve waited and that you can now do better than that. Do this for every trashy part you encounter. Don’t cheat! I’m watching.

So there you have it. Have I convinced you to try this? No? Okay, do this at least once, at least for a week and tell me if it didn’t work because I’m sure it will. Happy writing!