Remember the opening scene of Romancing the Stone? Remember Kathleen Turner as wildly successful romance novelist Joan Wilder, typing the final lines of her latest manuscript, and weeping at her own words?

Then she reels off that last page, bundles the pages together, and pops open a bottle of champagne (literally) before handing the book to her agent/editor.

Wow! She typed her last line, and she was done!!

Does that mean she didn’t write a draft? Does that mean she just wrote the whole novel from beginning to end, with no revisions??

Unfortunately, for most of us real-life writers, typing the last word of the story is far from the end.

Nope. For most of us, finishing a novel looks a lot different than it did for Joan.