What Happens After the First Draft

When I revise my writing, sometimes I feel like a musician trying to find my sound.

This is a subscriber-exclusive edition of I Have Notes, a newsletter in which I share essays, conversations, advice, and notes on writing.

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Last year, when asked how my book was going, I would often say something like “Well, it’s certainly a lot of words.” Was I being self-deprecating? A little, but when drafting I do often chart my progress in words accumulated. Some days are better than others—a day spent churning out a chapter might be followed by one in which I fight to eke out a few hundred words—but until a full draft exists, I can generally tell myself that I’m making progress, getting closer to my goal, so long as the chapter list keeps growing.

Now that I’m in the revision stage, the manuscript is 7,000 words shorter than it used to be. I can no longer tell you how things are going based on the word count. I can say that I have gone through the entire work a dozen times—at this point, there are scenes I can recite from memory. I spend a lot of time absently petting the dog or looking out my kitchen window, turning sentences over in my mind, trying to come up with a different way to convey an idea or feeling. I am a writer who tends to think and plan and draft quickly, but when I revise, I’m just slow; there is no other word for it. I go line by line, asking myself: Is this word, this detail, this phrase, doing what I want it to do here? If not, how can I say it better?

Every decision I make now is an attempt to narrow the gap between how something currently sounds and how I want it to sound. Progress isn’t necessarily linear, but it is satisfying to read and recognize that, compared with last week or last month, my manuscript is getting closer to what it needs to be. It’s sounding more and more like my writing does when I feel free, unafraid. I can see it growing stronger, day by day.

You might wonder why I don’t simply write this way from the start, with painstaking attention to detail, questioning every word and narrative choice. The answer is that I’ve tried, and I can’t draft that way—it’s too much pressure when I’m just trying to get the story down. It took me years, as a writer and an editor, to learn this lesson: Even if my first attempt winds up being extremely close to the final version, I need separate sessions for drafting and revision; I can’t do both at once. This is true whether I’m writing a 1,500-word article or a 75,000-word book—it’s much harder to arrive at a full draft if I approach it with that sort of maximizing mindset.

Every writer has their own approach to revision, which can also vary quite a bit depending on the project—the length, the timeline, the stakes—and how strong the first draft is. I thought I’d share two ideas I’ve found especially helpful when revising this book—not the only two I’ve deployed, but the two I began with:

Create a new map for the story. A visual representation of your project can be helpful at any stage—some writers I know use index cards for this; Taylor Harris has a whiteboard to help her organize plot points; Lydia Kiesling told me that she prints out her manuscript and cuts it up into sections. I knew that this first round of revisions would include some reorganization, especially in the first half of the book, and I needed to be able to visualize the new structure. Before I moved or cut or changed a word, I made a list of what happens to every major character in every section—and how these events, in turn, advance the larger plot—and shuffled the pieces around until I landed on a framework I felt was worth trying. That redrawn map became my new outline for the book—I consult it all the time, and (so far) it has saved me from the terrible fate of opening the manuscript and having absolutely no clue where or how to begin revising.

Revise toward your strengths. A. E. Osworth’s essay “Revise Toward Praise, Not Away From Criticism” really helped shift my thinking on what workshop (or editorial) feedback can do. On my first read through the newly restructured manuscript, I decided to try cataloging and writing toward its strengths, focusing on what I thought was working (and what my editor thought was working, based on her notes) as opposed to what wasn’t. I identified my “favorite” parts—scenes I felt proud of, sections my editor had highlighted approvingly—and tried to analyze them: Why were they working? Was it the description, the dialogue, the emotion, the shift in tone? I then turned to other chapters, and tried to write with those elements in mind: Was there a way to bring a particular voice, theme, style, or skill to other scenes?

One day, I did an entire pass focused on a single character—I wanted them to feel even more alive on the page, so I read and worked with only their story in mind, specifically looking for ways to strengthen their depiction and arc. Another day, as an experiment, I tried writing a prequel of sorts—a new chapter that takes place outside the chronology of my first draft—and now it’s part of the book. Revising has been fun; I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. This is the writing I like best, the writing I often feel as though I could do forever. (If you’re looking for revision exercises, check out the ones collected in Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses—a book every writer should have on their shelf.)

I have been working on the book nearly every day, weekends included, for the past couple of months. It’s all-consuming at this stage, another thing I had forgotten—I almost feel as though I’m cheating on my manuscript when I try to write anything else. Sometimes I can only spend an hour or so with it before I need to turn to something else. But having eyes on it every day means that even these shorter blocks of time are productive: It’s easier for me to fall back in when I sit down to work, as I never really leave that world anymore.

I realize the term revision might suggest that all I’m doing now is tinkering, fine-tuning, when in fact I’m still very much writing and producing this book. Sometimes I feel like a musician trying to find my sound, experimenting with different registers and hoping that all of this work will bring me closer to my true voice—at least, the one that this story requires, as I believe that writers can and do hold many different voices within us. Now that I have a solid draft, I know that I could just play the song as written, but I’m still working in the hope that every line, every note, will land just the way I want it to.

There’s little that is precise or scientific about this process, at least when I do it, which is another reason I find it so difficult to quantify my progress these days. But I know how my writing feels to me when I’m on—expressing what I need to express, not holding back or trying to sound like anyone else, inviting the reader in as best I can—and that’s the feeling I’m reaching for with every sentence.

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