RSSWhen You are 50% Done with Your First Draft
Feb 09
A Writer's Blog author, Writer, Writing Comments Off
Finishing your first draft of a full length novel is a major project. No matter how careful your planning is, no matter how detailed your notes are, no matter how long you take outlining the plot, there is still a small matter of putting the words on the page. It takes dedication, time, and focus. The bulk of your efforts happens long before you know whether the book is marketable or whether the characters are engaging and memorable, and before you can judge the worth of your story -- by whatever measure you use.
Here are three steps I advised you to take during the writing of your first draft:
1) Minimize distractions
2) Set aside a fixed time every day to write
3) Give yourself a break once in a while
As you get towards the end of your first draft, though, it’s time to switch gears. Your routine works for you. Your notes and outlines have done their job to keep you focused. You have to keep writing, but you also have to start looking at your work with a critical eye. No author works without the help of an editor (even if it’s your best friend or your mother) but you also have to develop some editing skills yourself. Nobody is going to work as hard as you to make your book perfect. Here is the next step to take that will not only help you finish your first draft, but will help you develop a sharp eye as an editor.
When You are 50% Done with Your First Draft
Now is the time to backtrack and read the book from the beginning. Take a colored pen (don’t mark up your draft in black or blue ink), print out a copy of everything you have written and read it from the beginning, making notes in the column and marking up changes directly on the text.
There is a reason I’m telling you to print it out. Unless you are a seasoned editor, I don’t recommend trying to edit directly on your computer. There is a emotional connection with the process when you start to slash through your writing with a pen. It forces you to see what is written on the page, not what you think you have written. The point of self-editing is to spot the mistakes before someone else has to.
First, watch out for the easy stuff. You should look at spelling and word choice. Now is the time to have a dictionary at hand and a thesaurus nearby. Any word that looks wrong, or feels wrong, you should stop and consider it. Look it up in the dictionary; is it spelled right? Look up synonyms in the thesaurus; is there a better word for what you are trying to say?
That should be (or become) fairly automatic when you edit your draft. Get used to always questioning word choice and sentence construction. Make notes about possible changes, cross out words you don’t want to use and write in a better word so you can go back and make the change in your draft.
Second, and this harder, you have to look at the flow of your story. That includes examining the plot. Does it make sense? Are the details there? What’s missing (maybe it’s coming up in the second half)? Are you confused at any point? If you’re confused, you better believe your reader is going to be.
It also means evaluating your characters. Are your characters true to themselves? By now, you should know your characters pretty well. Maybe not perfectly, but enough to recognize when dialogue or a particular action just doesn’t feel right. Is their behavior consistent from chapter to chapter? Is there anything we need to know about your main characters that we don’t yet (maybe it’s coming up the second half)?
Any time you run across something that is missing from the story, write a note to yourself directly on your draft. Any time you find an error, or something that doesn’t feel right, make a note to come back and look at it again later. An author’s instincts are pretty good, you know when a sentence, a character, or dialogue isn’t working. Trust yourself. If nothing else, note the page and paragraph so you can come back to it. You may decide later to leave it as is.
The flow of a story can be hard to diagnose. We know when a story is great, when we can’t put it down. We also know when a book is a clunker, hard to read and hard to follow the plot. As a reader, you know it instinctively. But how do you know it as a writer? As an editor? It takes practice to learn not only to recognize that there is a problem, but to put your finger on exactly what that problem is. Once you find the flaw, the writer in you can go back and fix it.
At this point in your draft, you don’t have to make all the decisions. Somethings are better left alone, at least until you are 100% done with your first draft. And keep writing. Only 50% more to go.
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Andrew Marx is the co-author of What Do You Say To The DJ?: A Slightly Phonographic Tale
