Unlock the Hidden Power of Your First Draft: What Every Writer Must Know Next
My Revision Plan
- Make a new copy of the manuscript and label it with a new version number (for example, “Draft 2”). Then I’ll never work on the first draft again. In case the next round of revisions takes me in the wrong direction, I can always return to the first draft and restart revisions from that point.
- Take a week to read the entire manuscript on my computer to see how well the story works. This is a quick read, roughly 10,000 words per hour. If I see a typo, my brain will get angry and insist I fix it, so I do. But fixing typos is not the point. The point here is to see if the story is working as a whole. Is the story structure right? Which scenes work? Which scenes fall flat? Are there inconsistencies in the story? Are there redundancies? Are there factual errors? Are there points I need to research more? I make quick notes in the margin for each of these. But I don’t fix any big problems. Not yet, anyway.
- Take two or three weeks and work through all the margin notes and fix the large-scale problems—the inconsistencies, the redundancies, the factual errors, the research questions. (My current manuscript has 42 of these, and I expect I can fix two or three of them per day, so it’s going to take a few weeks to get through them all.)
- Send the manuscript to my editor so she can tell me all the problems she sees. She will see a lot. She will see things I never thought of. When she sends me her comments, I will spend about three very miserable days wondering what’s wrong with her, and then admitting that she might have a point here and there, and then recognizing that the novel has several problems, and then realizing she is mostly right, and then hating myself and my novel. Eventually, I will get through this swamp and be ready to work again.
- Make another copy of the manuscript, this one labeled “Draft 3”.
- Take one day to review my one-sentence summary and one-paragraph summary of my novel. These tell me what my story is “really about” and I want to make sure that I’ve got that pinned down well, because the next step depends on it.
- Take a month or two to rewrite the entire manuscript, cutting it down to size and fixing all the problems my editor found. I already know my current manuscript is too long. I need to cut about 30k words. But it also has all sorts of problems that I don’t know about yet, which my editor will tell me. Her comments will help me decide which words to cut, because in some cases, I’ll need to delete entire scenes.
- Take a week to read through everything again and fix all the little wordsmithing stuff.
- Send the manuscript to my proofreader.
- Make a new copy, this time labeled “Draft 4”.
- Take a day to fix all the typos the proofreader caught.
At this point, I’ll be ready to publish. If I were working with a traditional publisher, I’d hand the corrected proofs off to them, and they’d publish it. But I act as my own publisher, so I’ll simply typeset the novel and click the Publish button.
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