First Draft Finished?

[Philip Overby]

This is a question worth asking I think. When do you finally say "Ok, this is finished. Now time to edit."

Do you edit while you're writing the first draft?

Do you wait until you're finished with the first draft and then start editing?

Do you not finish first drafts because you're constantly editing them?

I'm curious to know what others think about this.

I would say, for the only short novel I completed (about 25,000 words per the guidelines), that it took me about 2 months of steadily writing to get the first draft done. Then I did about three or four more edits before I sent it out to publishers. It was rejected twice and then I shelved it.

Even though I edited it many times, it still always felt like a first draft. I know the general rule is "edit until it's good" but a lot of writers (like myself) don't ever let anything be "good enough."

So when is a first draft good enough for you?

 

[Jabrosky]

Do you edit while you're writing the first draft?

Do you not finish first drafts because you're constantly editing them?

This is true for me. I aim to make my first draft as good as possible so I have less to rewrite all over again once the thing is finished.

 

[Leif GS Notae]

When you feel it expresses what you want to say and it does it well enough.

There is the 80% rule from Internet Marketing I try to keep in mind. You can easily make it to 80%, but the effort it takes to get to 90% or 100% is 3-4 times the effort to go from 0-80%.

In other words, there is a time when you have to step back and let it be. You've written your book, you send it off, you see what happens and go from there. Spending more time pounding at an anvil with your fingers isn't going to get you to perfection.

I've gotten into the habit of having freelance editors look at some of my smaller works (or I'll send what I think it the strongest and the weakest segments in a larger piece) and see what they say. There are many times I make foolish mistakes or forget something obvious that would prevent the piece from being strong.

Of course, that takes money, bartering, or both.

Really, when you feel you are at that point where you'll go crazy if you have to edit it for a 5th time, you've gone too far.

 

[Ireth]

With Low Road, the first novel I started writing, I wrote the whole thing out by hand in a notebook. The only "edits" I did were sticky-notes placed in the margins, letting me know what needed to be changed, cut out or added whenever I got around to typing it up. The first draft took me a long time to write -- from sometime in '06 or '07 until November of '10, with a lengthy hiatus in early '08, and a shorter one in early '10. It wasn't until '11 that I even looked at the book again, and when I finally started typing it up, I realized there was more that I needed or wanted to add than I'd ever thought of before. I'm still in the very early stages of the second draft.

My second novel (and thus far the only finished one), Winter's Queen, is substantially different. I started that one in late '10/early '11, and first considered it "finished" by August of '11. I typed it all up on my laptop, no handwritten first draft. I largely edited as I went, with some larger-scale tweaks done after the novel was more complete and I was starting to think about publishing. I've been polishing it since then in between rejection letters from prospective publishers.

 

[Steerpike]

My approach is edit after it is done. Edit it a reasonable number of times until you think it is in a good position to sell. Then send it out, and keep sending it out until it sells (and in the meantime move on to your next work).

 

[Feo Takahari]

I've found that the more times I edit a story, the more difficulty I have paying attention. Thus, the moment I see something in my story that's badly phrased, I change it, and if I don't know what to change it to, I specifically mark it for review. If I fail to do this, I may be so inattentive when I next edit the story that I don't notice the flawed phrasing and it slips through unaltered.

With that said, I cannot consistently edit writing into a comprehensible form. As such, I'm only done editing when I've made changes according to the criticism of at least one beta reader (who more often than not was confused until I explained things I hadn't properly phrased when I'd written them.)

 

[Graylorne]

I edit a lot. During writing, after finishing. But there definitely comes a moment when I force myself to stop. The moment when I'm no longer making the work better, only different. I've put my two upcoming novels away, waiting for the editor and I don't look at them again (well, not often).

 

[Kelise]

I edit while writing, but not massive edits. I wait until I've completed writing as much as I currently think makes up the story, then I put it aside for a few months so I'm not so caught up in it.

Then I read it through, editing what I can as I go along. Depending on what I find, I may leave it at that or I may start ripping scenes from here and there.

But I don't often finish anything because I constantly edit or lose confidence with it. The only things I seem to finish are grand-scale character workshop things (where I write to learn a character's story from their birth to their end) because I know I won't be editing those for eventual readers or publishing.

 

[Graylorne]

Well, Kelise, in your case I'd stop editing. Set yourself a daily word count goal (or weekly, if you're low on time) and write. Forget about it being good, just go for the finish line. Afterwards you can edit all you want, but finish what you started. And don't worry about quality, first drafts aren't meant to be good.

 

[Penpilot]

Do you edit while you're writing the first draft?

I rarely edit the first draft. I only edit if I'm certain the change will be so big and sweeping that proceeding would be a waste. Instead, I go back and leave a annotation in the text where I think the edit should take place describing in detail what I want changed and why. When I make the next pass, I find that sometimes what I wanted to change wasn't such a good idea and the annotation gets erase. It ends up saving me some time and lets me come at the idea of the change with fresh eyes.

Do you wait until you're finished with the first draft and then start editing?

This is my goal. When you complete the story before editing, you can evaluate the intended changes better.Sometimes what wasn't quite working before turns out to be fully functional because of something unplanned that pops into the story later. It allows for happy accidents.

So when is a first draft good enough for you?

Well here's the way I work.

1st step - Vomit the story out. This is the first draft.

2nd step - Figure out the plot issues and make a pass through to fix those - repeat until things make sense logically and emotionally. If you get stuck move on to step 3
3rd step - Make a pass to make sure the characters are consistent in actions and in dialogue - repeat until things make sense logically and emotionally. If you get stuck back move to step 2.

The each repetition of steps 2 and 3 I consider a draft.

If step 2 and 3 are done to satisfaction move on to step 4

4th step - Polish for flow, punctuation, word choice, and trim the fat - repeat until you make 2-3 passes where you change less than 10% of the text. If you can't seem to get a particular scene or chapter right, move on to the next without ever going backward.

Hope this helps a little.

 

[Kelise]

Well, Kelise, in your case I'd stop editing. Set yourself a daily word count goal (or weekly, if you're low on time) and write. Forget about it being good, just go for the finish line. Afterwards you can edit all you want, but finish what you started. And don't worry about quality, first drafts aren't meant to be good.

I agree - each year I seem to handle Script Frenzy and NaNo okay without editing... maybe this year for Camp NaNo, as long as I have a good plot structure I'll be able to write something stable enough for a first draft and I won't be as likely to edit.

 

[The Dark One]

I constantly edit as I create the first draft. I polish and polish and polish, and then I'll have sudden surge of 20-odd pages and I'll polish and polish again, making sure all the new stuff is perfectly integrated with what's already there.

For me, a second draft emerges after I've reached the end, reflected for a while, then gone back in and made some structural improvements - ie, by taking bits out, adding new bits and polishing everything in between to ensure it all still makes sense. It's so easy to make changes and leave in something (maybe just a word) that disturbs the sense of your world because it relates to a previous draft.

It's usually the 2nd draft where the true strength of the story starts to emerge (in my experience), but it's the 3rd or 4th draft that gets published.

I emphasise that a new draft must involve structural changes, not just polishes. I number my drafts 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 etc with the first number being the structural version and the second number being the latest polish.

 

[Chilari]

I've only completed a whole draft once. For that, I did write all the way to the end before starting to edit. It was a NaNo novel.

Generally, though, I don't get far into draft one before I decide to change something substantial (like the POV, the tone, the type of ending, etc) and start again from the beginning. I think this is a symptom of the story being wrong in fundamentals and thus the need for me to outline more before starting, rather than evidence of how I edit. Because I don't edit those false starts, I just scrap them and try again.

To be quite honest, I have little experience of editing. I didn't get far with editing the one story I finished before giving up and working on something else; when I came back to it, I changed the story quite considerably before again dropping it and the whole series it was meant to be part of. So that slow process of going through, working out what works and what fits and what doesn't, checking for consistency, tying up lose ends and checking spelling and grammar just doesn't happen for me. I get stuck into rewrites and reimaginings and reoutlinings, and never get to the bit where I've got something worth editing.

This is something I'll have to work through if I want to achieve the Blood Pact target. Which is why I've set aside the next seven weeks for outlining and character development before I start writing in July. I figure good outlining means I'll work through those big structural problems before I write a word of actual story.

 

[gavintonks]

I write chapters then put them together change the chapters and take them apart, editing all the time, it helps with the flow and understanding of what the story is last major edit chopped the story down from 140 000 to 117 000 taking out what I wanted to say to leave the story

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I edit during writing, if something occurs to me to fix or change, or that something isn't making sense. Once I finish a draft (that is, I have a complete story, even if it's not completely coherent or very good), I pass through it again smoothing things out, rewriting sections, analyzing the story. I repeat this four or five times overall.

Sometimes I shift gears partway through a story and then I have to go back and fix the first part because it no longer matches up with what happens in the later part. Whether I do this before I finish the later part, or do it in a subsequent pass, is a matter of how I feel at that particular moment.

 

[Steerpike]

As an aside, in relation to something said in the original post, I should point out that two rejections is nothing. I'd dust that thing off and get it back out there.

 

[Lorna]

I wrote my first draft through from beginning to end but I let my mind go wild and wrote 6 books worth. Too much vomit! Then I spent about 6 X attempting to establish what the core plot was, removing a perspective entirely, fiddling with the world and it's seasons and the background and how to divide the books. Now finally I have a trilogy and focusing on the first novel. I'm happy with the structure of 4 / 6 of it. So still stuck in Penpilot's no 2 after 2 years of work because I thought I was going to write a really awesome long series. And now I just want to get it done and do justice to the story of the main character. I'm hoping to have finished draft 7 in a couple of months time and begin 3. Thanks Penpilot for some excellent advice.

 

[Twilight Flyer]

As an aside, in relation to something said in the original post, I should point out that two rejections is nothing. I'd dust that thing off and get it back out there.

Yeah, rejections are a badge of honor. I've got in the neighborhood of a hundred for all my different projects over the past decade plus. I got my first YES almost exactly a year ago now and my first book ships on June 6th - can't wait for that Back To The Future moment. And at this point, I've got 2 more books coming out next year...my first fantasy novel tentatively releasing on April 13th. But I still have every one of those rejections letters.

As far as editing goes, again I think it's important to allow yourself some freedom. Sometimes I'll rough out 5 or 6 chapters before I even look at what I've written. Other times, I'll work on polishing a chapters until it gleams. Ultimately, the important this is that you don't hold yourself back. If you've got a head of steam and are cranking out some serious story, ride that wave as far as you can. When it slows down, then go back and look to edit some things.

 

[studentofrhythm]

NaNo has helped me "finish" first drafts: that is, the plot is in there and there's a "The End," but boy do those first drafts ever suck sometimes. My WIP is supposedly in second draft now but I'm changing so many things, and keeping so little of the first draft, that this feels like writing a new first draft all over again.

 

[Penpilot]

^^ You can look at it this way, the fact that you're willing to throw away so much shows you're not stuck on it. Although you're still searching for the complete story, you know what you want, and quite frankly have the strength to throw the "junk" away, which is good.