When I finally finished my first draft of my novel, it felt like a huge accomplishment. 100,000 words written in seven months with at least four hours per day devoted to the task. I had proved to myself that I could do it – I had beaten back the critical voice in my thoughts (fear of failure), the ridiculous doubt of whether this is what I wanted to devote my life to (fear of success), and the vicious cycle of just talking about doing something instead of actually doing it (perfectionism).
It’s perhaps a good thing that I didn’t know this at the time, but finishing your first draft only represents about 10% of the work required to really “finish” your novel. The other 90% of the work is spent in rewrites, critique groups (alpha readers), beta readers, researching agents, honing the query letter and synopsis, attending conferences, pitching to everyone you know, getting an agent, going through agent edits, dealing with publishing offers, and then we transitioning to the selling part of your novel – marketing your book, setting up book signings, free giveaways, pushing more content, etc. (And yes, you will have to do this even if you go through a traditional publisher.)
After you set your work away for a few weeks, it comes the time for you to set about revising. This process can take weeks or months or years depending on how dedicated you are to improving your writing.
You can be a great writer but you’ll probably produce a crappy first draft. That is just the nature of the beast. When I write the first draft of my blog posts, I usually spend a decent amount of time running through the structure, deleting extraneous thoughts, making sure the sentences flow, and then checking for typos and grammar errors.
Sometimes that last step is a little rushed. Though typos and grammar are important to convey basic intelligence (also an ability to adhere to arbitrary rules), in terms of what is crucial – content is king. You can have a perfect grammatically constructed sentence but if it does nothing to advance your ideas, then its existence is meaningless and therefore void.
In your first couple of revisions, edit the ideas, not the words. It’s easy to say, harder to implement. Every time I sit down to edit, about half of the things I want to change pertain to how I phrased something – which synonym to use instead or adding a phrase to fill out the thought more. It’s exhausting and counterproductive, because at that point you are spending energy on line items that won’t really impact the book in any significant way. My “favorite” waste of time is when you edit a paragraph and realize a few paragraphs down that you had written it that way for a good reason. Clicking “undo” on your edits is not a soul-fulfilling experience.
What impacts the book are the big edits – characters, scenes, themes. These edits are just as important as they are difficult, so naturally your mind will want to find any way to avoid tackling them. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, and texting your old buddy from middle school will not help you face these behemoths. Unfortunately.
A lot of the beginning writer’s process seems to be figuring out which strategies work for you. It involves a good amount of trial and error, which can be exhausting especially since half the time you’re wondering if your novel will even sell and the other half of the time you’re focused on earning enough money to keep supporting your writing habit.
Right now, my rewriting strategy involves reading through chapters and writing down changes I want to make. As I go through the suggested edits, I figure out which ones are Big Ideas vs. Line Edits vs. Food for Thought. Sometimes I will read a line or a paragraph and get an idea for a plot line in the second book. Instead of taking my time to go on a tangential journey and indulge in that thought, I simply write down the page number, the phrase that spurred the thought, and a short phrase of what my idea was. When I finish going through the book, I will collect the categorized edits in bundles and tackle the ones that are urgent (deleting entire scenes or characters) and non-urgent (addressing line edits). There is a chance that when I reread my edits I will wonder what I meant, but the hope is this process will take days, not weeks.
The idea behind this is to prevent yourself from making time consuming line edits and focus on the bigger picture of what actually needs work. I tend to write a lot of plot, so seeing what is not absolutely necessary to the basic story is helpful. One freelance editor at the conference I went to suggested highlighting yellow all of the words conveying facts and then highlighting the rest in pink to see how much of the story is not providing information. It is more about balance than about eliminating all of the pink. I have not tried this strategy, but it may work for you.
Revising is not easy, but it is necessary to creating a great book. If you have completed your first draft, I suggest taking a few weeks to celebrate and then diving back into it with your own revising strategy and timeline. A lot of beginning novelists get stuck in the revising process, since that is where the bulk of the work is done. (If any writers attempt to pitch it to an agent before their novel is polished enough, they will be directed back to the revision stage.) If you find you are stuck, take a breather, try one of these strategies, and move on to something else.
