Finished That 1st Draft? What Next?

Driving around the mean streets of London, you learn to appreciate the oft-forgotten charms of the printed roadmap. GPS is dense and insistent, and it’s easy to find yourself on a narrow side street that seems to lead nowhere and is near-impossible to get out of. You get to a place of panic where you can’t see the forest for the trees and it’s then you know you are well and truly lost.

Contemplating what comes after you’ve completed the first draft of a novel is a lot like getting lost in London. The journey up to now has been awesome, inspiring, life-affirming - but there comes a point when you have to admit that you have no idea where you’re going or, indeed, if you’ll ever find your way back home.

On a writer’s journey, this predicament raises existential questions: How do you find your way back to the beginning, or else on to the next great destination? What if you simply can’t fathom where to go next? How is it that being lost seems fun at first— but quickly becomes scary, or even hopeless?

Many new writers working on their first novel never make it past a first draft—not because they’ve stopped believing in their story or because they’re lazy or easily knocked off track. They grind to a halt at the very first “The End” because they just don’t know what comes next. There is no obvious motivating incident for rewrites and revisions. That great big question—How do I make this better? —often goes unanswered.

Experienced writers, on the other hand, know that their first draft is the first of many. They know, too, that getting at least a little bit lost between drafts is an essential and often defining part of the process. That’s not to say the post-first-draft transition is easy. As in London, where tiny roads branch off haphazardly in all directions, working out which direction to head as you move from first draft to second can be a problem for novice and experienced writers alike.

Figuring out how to get from “shovelling sand into a box,” as Shannon Hale calls the first draft, to something polished enough to pitch, is not easy even for high-flying best-selling authors.

Novelist Jennifer Egan likes her first drafts to be “blind, unconscious, messy efforts.” It’s a long way from there to her polished, deeply researched books. That magic doesn’t happen overnight. John Irving admits to writing first drafts in a matter of weeks, but then spends months or years revising.

Obviously, there is no magical treasure map that every writer can follow. And even if you think you’ve found the right map for your journey, how do you know if your sense of direction is any good?

First drafts are often intensely private affairs, the pages lying in a theoretical hermetically sealed vault, away from prying eyes. As Terry Pratchett famously said, the first draft is about you telling yourself the story. How, then, do you gain sufficient critical distance to revise your own work?

Toni Morrison flagged that challenge for all of us. “You have to be able to read what you write critically. … [and] surrender to it and know the problems and not get all fraught,” she said.

Unfortunately, we are not all Toni Morrison-level geniuses.

This is where a developmental editor earns their corn: injecting a modicum of sanity into the second-draft process by focusing on universal elements of storytelling that help the writer set priorities and answer, at least in part, the “How do I make this better?” question.

Typically, this involves focusing on five critical aspects common to most novels. An editor who systematically and honestly checks in on how each aspect functions in the novel—and identifies where rewrites and revisions are needed scene by scene to make these elements work better and harder in service to the story—is on the way to helping their author structure a better second draft.

The building blocks of the second-draft revision process are grounded in just five aspects of the novel, which stand alone but also interact with and affect one another:

1. The main character. The MC must be fully present in the novel: sharply drawn, replete with contradictions, a catalyst for action, and gives the reader a reason to care.

2. Emotional stakes. The stakes should be high, clearly differentiated among the major characters, and serve as a source of tension and conflict.

3. Essential scenes. The goal is to (a) identify scenes ripe for cutting or trimming because they don’t move the story forward or serve as static info dumps; and (b) detect where new scenes are needed to deepen a character’s motivations, reveal conflict, or add other critical texture.

4. Pacing. A novel that unfolds at just one speed (all fast, all slow) is bound to bore or exhaust the reader. Variable pacing among scenes and between chapters is essential.

5. World-building. World-building isn’t only for fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction. Every novel is built on rules, and the writer must ensure the rules are consistently applied and sufficiently sketched.

The key to making this checklist work for both the author and editor is to work it hard in a spirit of honest and generous criticism : to study how each aspect functions on its own in the manuscript and how they work together to generate conflict, suspense, or whatever big statements the author is seeking to make.

Geoff Poundes is a professional developmental editor, specialising in non-fiction and in particular business, sport and history, biography and memoir. Go to www.geoffpoundeseditor.co.uk to find out more.