How to Go From Awful First Draft to Wonderful Revision

You’ve completed your first draft—and it’s awful. Don’t be surprised; most writers will tell you that a first draft is usually pretty rotten. (Ernest Hemingway even applied a cuss word to it.) Why is that? You thought you were aiming at the target, but now you’ve found the finished product isn’t what you hoped for.  But honestly, why did you expect anything else? This is why they call it a rough draft. (D.R.A.F.T. stands for Dat Rotten Awful First Try!) Did you really think you were going to hit the bull’s eye on the first try? I like what Giovanni Papini, author of The Life of Christ, says in this regard:

Most people think that to make a book it is enough to have an idea and then to take so many words and put them together. Not so. A kiln of tiles, a pile of rocks, are not a house. To build up a house, to build up a book, to build up a soul, are undertakings which require all of a man’s power. . . . Only when he has finished a book does an author know how he should have written it. When he has set down the last word, he ought to turn back, begin at the beginning, and do it all over again with the experience acquired in the work.

I said I liked what Papini said, but I take it back. I think Papini was some kind of glutton for punishment. If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of your time trying to figure out how to avoid extra work, not doing the same job twice.

But within reason, Papini has a point. You’ve learned a few things in the writing of this book; don’t save this knowledge for the next book you write—you may never get a second chance if you don’t put your best into this one. Put everything you can into this book, even if it means you have to go back to square one. In other words, you need to go back to the beginning steps of brainstorming, researching, and outlining, retracing the process of writing this first draft.

Step One: Forget, Then Remember

Before you tackle Papini’s “pile of rocks,” however, you need to do something that all great writers do—goof off. I’m serious. Go fly a kite; hit the beach; pick a fight with your neighbor. Do anything but look at that Dat-Rotten-Awful-First-Try. Forget about the first draft for at least a few days, and you can go back to it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Now that you’ve forgotten about the first draft, don’t dip into it yet. First, try to remember what you originally wanted the book to look like. Sit down and prepare an outline of the book, but do it all from memory, and don’t look at the first draft yet.

“But I’m a pantser,” you may say. “I write by the seat of my pants. I haven’t outlined anything since fifth-grade English class.” Too bad. Do it anyway. This is not intended to be anything more than an exercise in refreshing your memory. (You may be one of those brilliant, photographic-memory people who have every detail of your book stored for instant retrieval in your mind, and for you I suppose this is just a waste of time. I am so envious.)

Step Two: Take a Quick Breeze-Through

Now you can look at your first draft. Skim, don’t read, the entire manuscript. Mark off the places (or make marginal comments) that seem a little weak, need some expansion, or need to be cut down (maybe even removed, you never know). At this point, you are just identifying problem areas. Don’t try to figure out how you plan to revise a section, just flag it.

If you’re like me, you will find other places to flag where you deliberately left a section undone. When I’m writing a first draft, I may find I’m stuck at a certain spot, and I can’t move on. In a case like that, I put in a bracketed statement, like “[Put an anecdote here, to clarify this point]” or “[write scene where Joe and Sally meet].” If you have anything like that in your first draft, clearly mark it with a marginal note—it is amazingly easy to forget these sections, but your editor will see them right away!

Also, compare your from-memory outline to the actual first draft. Do they match? Are there gaps in your outline? Gaps in the draft? If portions of the first draft are missing from your outline, you may want to rethink those sections (nonfiction) or scenes (fiction). They may be extraneous, or they may be necessary but may fit more logically in a different place in the manuscript.

Once you have done your overview of the manuscript, you can start with the real revisions. But if you need a day or two to clear your mind, feel free.

Step Three: Deep Revision

Even if you’ve taken a break for a day or two, the overview of the first draft can be quite discouraging. You may have dozens of marginal notes in the manuscript highlighting missing or extraneous material, confusing sections, and rough spots. Worse yet are sections that don’t seem right, but you can’t figure out why. It’s overwhelming!

The solution to this is simple (and I almost hesitate to mention it because it’s so obvious): do your revision one chapter at a time. In your first skim of the manuscript, you did a high-altitude fly-over; or if you prefer, a tour of this rugged territory in a fast-moving, all-terrain vehicle. Now you’re going to cover the same ground on foot.

So, forget about the rest of the manuscript and its potential landmines—focus on Chapter One. I’ve even got Scripture to back me up on this: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow [or the next chapter for that matter], for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day [each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence] has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

It’s true, though, that you can’t forget about the other chapters completely. I sometimes find that when I revise a chapter, it affects the content of later chapters. No problem—make yourself a note (in the margin, perhaps). Make enough of a note so you can remember what you’re talking about, but keep it brief so you can stay focused on the revisions to the current chapter. (It can be very easy to find yourself trying to revise two chapters at the same time—don’t drive yourself crazy.)

And you don’t even have to focus on the whole chapter. Start with the first paragraph, or even just the first sentence. Does it hold together? Any excess words? Could it be phrased differently, so it’s punchier and easier to understand?

Crawl through the first chapter, paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, and you’ll soon find what Papini was driving at with his analogy of rebuilding a book, brick by brick and stone by stone. But I still think he was a bit of a masochist