You need to read your own work 81 times

Every writer has his/her own process of writ­ing a book. From start to fin­ish it usu­al­ly takes me, more or less, about a year to com­plete. I have crude­ly cal­cu­lat­ed that I read and reread that book some eighty times. This can be tedious, ardu­ous, annoy­ing but, trust me, necessary. 

In the course of my re-read­ing, I dis­cov­er big mis­takes and small ones. I also dis­cov­er the need for easy changes, and hard ones. I make minor plot changes (someone’s name) and major ones. (The first draft of Crispin: The Cross of Lead, had no cross in the sto­ry.) I enhance the qual­i­ty of the text.  I look for places to cut. “Less is more.” Since my research is on-going, that research can lead to changes. Such was the case for Crispin. I was in Lon­don doing research and in the British Muse­um (Medieval Sec­tion) saw a dis­play of crude lead cross­es hand­ed out dur­ing the Great Plague. Back to the book. 

But there are a num­ber of things I do that help me re-read my work with a bit of objectivity. 

1. I put the work aside for a while. The longer the bet­ter. But this is also very hard because I have dead­lines, and I’m more than anx­ious to get the work done. (That’s when I get paid.) 
2. The Computer—upon which I work—helps a great deal. I change the look of the man­u­script. I change the font. I change the mar­gins. I change the back­ground col­or. Light blue, light green, light purple. 
3. I arbi­trar­i­ly choose a page or sec­tion and work on it at ran­dom, there­by pulling the book out of context. 
4. I read the book to some­one. I do so with pen in hand and make notes as to my own reaction. 
5. I read the book to a class of young peo­ple, the ones for whom the book is written. 
6. I run the text though a num­ber of spelling and gram­mar check­ers. They nev­er ful­ly agree and I’m forced to look at every­thing they highlight. 
7. Check­ing for word dupli­ca­tion helps a lot.
8. I give the book to a trust­ed friend and lis­ten to a cri­tique. Nev­er argue! 
9. Of course my edi­tor reads the book (mul­ti­ple times, too) and always (each time) has sug­ges­tions for good changes. 
10. The pub­lish­er has copy edi­tors and they can and do make sim­ple sug­ges­tions, but not infre­quent­ly com­plex ones. 

And then, and then, the year’s work is done. The book is pub­lished. BUT—a month after a book’s pub­li­ca­tion a read­er sends me a note: “Dear Avi. On page 217 there is a typo. A word has been left out. It should read………….” 

Yes, friends, it’s that eighty-first re-read­ing that makes the dif­fer­ence. Should have done it.