Rachael wrote to me and said, “I’m 9k into my second draft, and it’s taken me a year to get there. I feel like I’m trying to edit everything all at once–so much so, that it’s almost like writing a first draft all over again, except this one isn’t supposed to be bare bones–and I’ve gotten really discouraged. So my question is this: how do you know what to edit in the second draft, and what to let go for now? How do you keep it from being so utterly and completely overwhelming? There will always be another draft, but I don’t know what to focus on for this one. Characters? Plot? Beginning/end? Everything seems vital, but it’s too much to handle all at once.”
Oh, Rachael! Hugs!
I’m sure many other young writers nodded along as they read your words. This might not make you feel any better but I nodded along! Here are some things to keep in mind:
When you are a young writer—whether you’re literally young or just new to writing novels—you are learning a lot very quickly. Even if it doesn’t feel like it. I never edited the first few complete manuscripts I wrote because by the time I finished them, I could see that they had serious problems—including that I was too bored with the story and characters to care enough to fix them.
Eventually I wrote the first draft of the book that became my debut novel. I rewrote this book three times because of what I learned during the process. Sometimes the best thing to do is just open up a blank document and try again.
I don’t know if this is encouraging or discouraging, but even after you’ve been writing for a while, some first drafts just come out messier than others. That’s true for my current work in progress. I wrote the draft last year, when I was pregnant and had inconsistent work time.
On top of that, I normally write my stories in first person with one narrator in good ol’ Microsoft Word. But I wanted to try Scrivener, and I thought I would need multiple point of view characters, so I decided to write in third person.
I was about 20,000 words into the book when I admitted Scrivener didn’t work for me, and that my voice loses something when I try to write in third. I eventually finished my first draft, and the result was a poorly thought out story that wandered here and there before ending in a very jarring way. And I’ve been a published novelist since 2009!
When it came time to edit that book, I just opened a new Word document and started over. I could still use a decent amount of my material from the first draft, of course, but I found it easier to just copy and paste bits of scenes rather than trying to fit all the new material around the old.
I think the smarter approach is to just embrace that editing is a messy process.
Editing a novel is different than editing an essay or an article. It’s possible you will read your first draft, know that it needs to be fixed, but not really know how. This is one reason why we encourage writers to learn about story structure and to analyze the stories you take in. Understanding components of stories that resonate—and stories that miss the mark—will help you identify problems in your own manuscript.
I didn’t know what to do. I believed them that something was wrong with my book, but I didn’t know what, so I definitely didn’t know how to fix it.
Several months later, I was reading a book that I just couldn’t get into. Then I realized a similarity between that opening scene of that book and mine:
This author’s book opened with three friends meeting up at a bar after work to have a drink together. The first scene was mostly just their conversation.
My book opened with two friends meeting up at a coffee house after school. The whole scene was just these two friends having a disagreement. I had thought the tension of the dialogue was enough to hook a reader, but when I saw it play out in the other author’s book, I could see that it was boring.
Chances are that you know at least some things that need to be fixed. Jill wrote a great post on Wednesday about the “macro edit,” which is that first big picture edit. This would be a great one for you to read if you haven’t already. We also wrote the Go Teen Writers book to help writers through edits, so that can be a good resource too.
Since Jill talked about this in depth on Wednesday, I’ll just summarize briefly. The instinct for most writers is to edit their book from start to finish. But if we try to edit for everything—plot, characters, theme, grammar, sentence structure, consistency—all at once … that’s a lot to try and hold in our heads.
So I read through my first draft and make a list as I go. Things that need to be researched, story questions I raise but never answer, character motivations that seem thin, and so on. Then I divide my list into bigger issues and smaller issues.
Big issues that I will tackle in a second draft might be, but aren’t limited to:
- Something I didn’t bother to research in the first draft that could make a big impact on the story.
- A major character who I don’t understand very well yet. I will usually take time to write a character journal if I haven’t already and then rework scenes from there.
- A villain who is too convenient/too obvious/shows up too late in the book to feel satisfying. Often I need to add scenes early on to help with this.
- A beginning that drifts too much before the real story starts. I’ll figure out what can be cut.
- A twist that I don’t set up properly, or one that doesn’t feel as twisty as I’d like.
- Why does my character choose to go to this place? I never explain that.
- What is my villain doing during the off-stage time?
- I say this character is going to be gone for two weeks but they’re only gone for one.
- My character knows a piece of information before they’re told. How can I rearrange this?
If you have other thoughts or encouragement for Rachael, leave them below!