From First to Second Draft: The Journey Continues…
From my Newsletter, Spring 2009
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A student who finished her first draft (yeah!) asked me, How should I approach doing the edit?
If you’ve taken my and others’ advice and let yourself just write out the first draft to the end, there are a bunch of things you have to look at in the edit which will produce the second draft.
First, structural things. Are there places you know things need to change? What things do you know now that you’ve finished the draft that you didn’t know in the beginning? I would advise making a list of these. And even before that, remind yourself of the theme and the point of the book. This is helpful to decide which things are staying and which are going. For instance, if you’ve decided that the focus of the book should be much narrower and you have too many plot points, knowing your theme, and making the list of things you now know, can help in deciding which things to lift out. (And remember, you don’t have to lose these plot points, they can be saved as good material for another book. It can help to create a separate document into which you put all the things that don’t fit the new version of the book.) For example, you discover your theme is about finding love and you’ve got too many scenes that are about self-discovery, which do not move the story forward. Or, you thought you were writing a biography but realized you actually only want to focus on the most relevant decision in the person’s life, and you can let go of the part that describes where he was born and grew up. You could also decide that everything is staying, it just needs to be in a slightly different order.
Sometimes, it can help you get an objective view to look at your structure in fun ways, like putting all your plot points on index cards and lining them up on a bulletin board, or using rolls of architecture paper to write out all the themes and where they appear throughout the manuscript. Using different colors can help you keep track.
Second, the writing itself. There are probably a bunch of things you know need fixing. This is where the old-fashioned editing style can come in handy. After you have made the main structural changes, I would print out a hard copy of the book – double-spaced!!-and work from that, with a pen, to make the revisions. (I know no one wants to waste paper, but at a certain point it would be like trying to build a house without nails-these are the tools of your trade and you need to give yourself permission to use them.) This part is laborious and can even be painstaking but it is well worth it to create a clean manuscript. Then enter the changes into the manuscript, and print it out again for a final read-through. Then you can call this your second draft. Now you are ready to send it out!