It only took five years, but it's done. My first draft of my first book is complete,
Yay!
Well, of COURSE it is, it's your first draft!
There are subplots I dropped in the midst of writing, huge swaths of dialogue, not to mention a couple of inconsistent characters.
Ahh, yes, the "I Changed the Story because I was Editing While Writing" thing that everyone does. Don't worry about that right now.
So, assuming I don't want it to take another five years to polish, what now?
Now you table it and do anything and everything you can do to get the draft completely out of your mind. If you're still thinking about it as though you're still writing it, you haven't taken enough time away from it to start making all the edits you'll need to make.
How do I go about this editing process?
The first thing I do is go over the whole work and fix only grammar and syntax errors that my brain auto-corrected when reading it as I wrote.
Once that's done, I make a list of all the things I don't like and rank them from most to least important.
Then I fix everything on the list, from the bottom up. You'd be surprised at how often I get to the top of the list and find that I fixed one of the big issues when I fixed the smaller ones.
Next I make another list of things I don't like about it now, and repeat the above step.
Now I've got a manuscript I like, but it's too long - not everyone will have this problem, but I tend to be overly verbose when I don't necessarily need to be: kind of like how this post was before I trimmed it. So now I list all the characters in the story and classify them: there is one MC (sometimes two), a small group of major characters, a larger group of supporting characters, and a whole mess of forgettable characters who advance the plot and vanish.
With this list in hand, I seek and destroy any subplot that doesn't involve either the MC(s) or at least two major characters, unless that subplot ends in the permanent removal of a major character from the story (death, moving to Siberia, etc.).
Now I table it again and repeat the process of driving it out of my head.
Once I come back to it, I start making all the nit-picky edits such as adverb removal, rewording of phrases, and peer editing.
Once I have a draft that both I and my trusted peer editor (a writer friend from high school named Peter), I pass out beta copies and get cracking.
Once edited how do I find trustworthy beta readers?
How do you find trustworthy friends? Trial and error, mostly.
This may sound paranoid and pretentious but how do I know someone won't steal my idea?
If they don't write, they won't steal your idea. If they
do write, they'll now have a subconscious copy of the parts of your manuscript that stood out to them on call for inspiration later. This always happens. If they try to plagiarize you they won't get very far, and if they take inspiration from what you wrote they'll invariably take it in a different direction than you did, and in time you'll have a beta copy of an awesome story on your desk.
I might be a little overwhelmed right now, excited, but overwhelmed nonetheless.
It's perfectly natural to feel that way right now. But hey, you've finished your first draft! You're halfway to having a copy of your first publication hand-delivered to that pesky retired uncle who was always telling you to get a "real" job, like he did. Or was that just me after I had nine articles published over the six editions of my school paper last year?