30 things I've learnt from 5 years being published: no 8 – First drafts get harder - but editing gets easier
September 6 2023 marks 5 years since my first novel was released 😲
I’ve now published 6, and have 2 more under contract.
To celebrate, I’m sharing a new post about what I’ve learnt from being published EVERY DAY throughout the month. This post is part of that series!
Click here for the rest →
I thought it might be a good idea to get a bit more technical in today’s post and talk about something to do with the actual writing for a change.
So here’s a revelation I didn’t expect when I started on my one-book-per-year journey: THE FIRST DRAFT GETS HARDER.
I know, right? How can it possibly be any harder than when you first started writing and were completely clueless about how to write a book?
Well, you see, that’s exactly where the answer lies.
As people say: you don’t know what you don’t know. And when you first start writing you’re completely green. You have no idea whether what you’re writing is any good or not, but you’re enjoying it (on some level at least, hopefully) so onwards you go, blissful in your ignorance that info-dumping everything about the protagonist’s backstory in the first few paragraphs is not the most enticing way to start a novel.
But once you’ve been around the editing merry-go-round a few times, you start to wise up. And suddenly the concept of the ‘shitty first draft’ starts to ring true.
You start to realise that yes, your first drafts are shitty! And in fact, they always have been!
But once you know this, it makes writing the damn thing that little bit harder.
You wish, wish, wish you could write a first draft that didn’t need ripping to pieces and rebuilding afterwards (think of the time you’d SAVE!) but YOU CAN’T.
This is why writing your first draft gets harder. Since you got your book deal and edited your previous book with a publisher, you have acquired a new friend, called Experienced Inner Critic Who Does Actually Know What He’s Talking About, and he loves nothing more than sitting on your shoulder as you type, hissing criticisms and laughing at your poor attempts to build suspense and basically making you despair.
First drafts used to be my favourite part of writing. Now they are my least favourite.
I hate, hate, hate writing first drafts.
I have to really force myself to push through, to convince myself that I’m not going to die before I have the chance to edit it, so no one else is ever going to see it in this terrible state.
I have to tell myself repeatedly that ‘you can’t edit a blank page’ and ‘bad writing is better than no writing’ and remind myself that I’ve done this a few times now and somehow it’s all fixable in the end.
But in case you’re despairing - I have some good news.
The good news is that editing, while still monumentally tricky, does get slightly easier.
Well, maybe not easier, but you get better at it. You DO learn stuff with each novel you write, even if it feels as though you aren’t.
And so when it comes to the edit, somehow your brain can contort itself into weird positions and fix plot issues even if you don’t understand exactly how it’s doing it.
Your first draft probably won’t need quite as much editing as your first first draft either.
The reason your new first drafts are harder to write is because you know more about what makes a Good Book, and so you’re doing a better job from the outset, and thus your shitty first draft, while still shitty, is actually not as shitty as the very first shitty first draft you ever wrote.
Also you’re more aware of things from your reader reviews, like pacing and unlikeable characters and you’ll find you subconsciously get better at fixing these issues as you go through and edit.
You’re also a lot less precious than you used to be. ‘Murdering your darlings’ becomes ‘murdering a bunch of words you quite liked but, hey, fuck em, they’re not serving the plot so they can go’.
I used to hate editing. I dreaded getting my structural edits, and hated the process of pulling my ‘perfect’ book apart and trying to rebuild it.
But now, genuinely, I far prefer the structural edits to the first draft. I get immense satisfaction out of making a book better, and I really enjoy it.
I also love getting my editor’s insight into the book and a fresh perspective - it really can help unlock even more creativity, and while I might not always go with whatever changes she might suggest, I can usually come up with a solution that's even better, and certainly better than the original iteration.
My top tip when it comes to your edits is to put your ego to one side and focus on trying to make the book better for the reader.
So yes. Who knew that as you write more, first drafts get harder but editing gets easier?
Good news and bad news today folks! But perhaps surprising to some of you, as it was to me…
