What comes after Draft 1?
"Should I finish this crappy ending, or go back and revise?"
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QUESTION:
I’ve been working on a draft of a new novel, with the plan that I’d write a long, unfettered draft through to the end, and then I’d go back and chop and reshape and revise. However, I’m 115K in and now realize that I need to fundamentally rework the bones of the story in order to make the main conflict, climax, and resolution come together. Should I push myself to write a crappy ending in order to complete the first draft? Or should I stop here and start reshaping it from the beginning? I know I’ll have to do that anyway, but it feels demoralizing to have put in all this work and still not have an actual draft completed. I don’t know if I’m looking for permission to stop writing this endless draft, or for a push to keep going and see it through.
This is my third novel. I’m currently on submission with what I’d hoped would be Book 1 in this series, but things aren’t looking great. I also had a previous manuscript that I shelved. After seeing those first two books sputter out, I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to finally get this one right.
- Push Forward or Go Back?
Dear PF/GB,
Congratulations on being SO CLOSE to this first draft, whatever shape it may or may not be taking, and congratulations on having written three manuscripts, including one that’s made it so far as to be on sub with publishers right now. THAT IS NO SMALL POTATOES.
I totally hear the drive to nail this book and have it finally be The One. I’m starting with your last point, not the main question, because I think this is where the crux of the matter lies, and the source of your worry. What if you do this draft “wrong”? What if you misstep and it never comes together and you’re left with another manuscript that doesn’t go where you’d hoped? (Oh my god, did I write this question? Are you me???)
I know it’s easy for someone else to sit back and say don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer here, you just have to write the best book you can because the rest is pretty much out of your hands. It’s frustrating advice because there’s nothing you can DO, and it feels dismissive of the very real pressure you’ve identified - the pressure to “get it right,” with “right” in this context meaning “sell to a publisher.”
Unfortunately I’m going to be that a**hole reiterating that all you can do is strive to write the best book you can, because there’s literally nothing else you can control.
Maybe this will be the book that sells. Maybe it’ll be huge and be everything you hope for. Maybe it’ll be huge and that will turn out to not be quite what you’d wanted after all. Maybe it’ll be modest, and the joy of that first sale will turn into a different kind of disappointment. Maybe it’ll be modest, and that will be perfect for you. Maybe it still won’t be this book that sells, and you’ll have to pick yourself up and try again.
If this book sells, you’ll write another one. If this book doesn’t sell, you’ll write another one. Is that depressing? I hope not. I hope instead that it’s a reminder that there’s joy and intention in the writing itself, and joy and intention in the choices you get to make now about the discoveries you’re finding in your manuscript, and the discoveries you’ll continue to uncover in each subsequent revision.
If this were your very first novel…
…my advice would be to push through and finish. Finish quickly, finish roughly, finish with entire sections simply bracketed with [fight scene here] or [devastating one-liner] or [tearful scene as the MC says goodbye]. It can be loose, it can be a glorified outline, it can be totally different from what you’d initially envisioned and whatever it will ultimately become. So much of writing a novel (or anything) is getting started, sure. But then so much of it is also being able to FINISH.
I see a lot of people who know their beginning isn’t right, and so they go back and revise, and revise, and revise, but it never goes anywhere because it has no place TO go. Because they haven’t dealt with the messy, imperfect, help-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing, truly horrendous first draft. Which, as you already know, grows and changes as you write it, and opens up new avenues within the story that you can’t figure out until you’ve actually written a whole bunch more and can start to see the parts you’re missing.
If you’re reading this and you’re working on your first novel draft, a) Yay! and b) Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
However, this isn’t your first draft.
You’ve written a whole entire novel and then ANOTHER novel that made it to an agent and then in front of publishers, which means you also revised it a whole bunch and then some more until your eyeballs metaphorically or literally bled and you’d rethought every comma and conjunction and wanted to chuck the whole thing out the window and move to an alpaca farm and finally know inner peace.
So I know that you know how to make yourself start a book—and, more importantly for this particular conversation, you know how to finish one. I’m not worried about this manuscript turning into something that languishes, unfinished, on your computer for years. You’ve written enough of this draft — yes, it’s a draft even if you haven’t typed the end! — to know what it is and what it needs. You have an idea for where to go next, which means you have the momentum to carry you through what will be the first of several more rounds of revision.
So if you’re looking for permission to hit pause, go back, revise, and then write the ending you know this book needs, consider me your fairy godwriter saying go ahead. Trust your instinct. Put in what your characters need from Page 1 to see them through to The End.
But if it feels really lousy to go back to the beginning without being able to say “I finished Draft 1 and now I’m onto Draft 2,” here are some other thoughts:
I call my first drafts Draft 0. Even Draft 1 feels like too much pressure for me because then — ugh! — I have to wind up with a first draft at the end of it, and what I write doesn’t feel like a draft, it feels like a tornado hit an outhouse, and I’d better leave the metaphor there. Can this be your Draft 0, and now you’re going back and writing the actual Draft 1?
That being said… When I’m writing my Draft 0, I also want to respect all the effort I’ve put in — I don’t want to pretend it’s not a draft, because dammit, I’ve worked hard on it! Can you call it Draft 1 even though it’s not technically finished? I wouldn’t advise writing half a novel and then claiming to have written a whole draft, but you’ve got a pretty realized first pass already on the page. Maybe someone else is a stickler for definitions, but you’re the writer. You can make your own rules.
Can you make this stage of revision part of the Draft 1 process? When I was writing 60,000 word category romance, I got into a pattern where I always, always stopped at the black moment— right at 48,000 words it turned out, even when I didn’t plan it that way, wow story structure is so cool — and then I went back and revised from the beginning, for precisely the reasons you’ve identified. No matter how much I outlined in advanced, I never knew until I’d written the climax exactly what the main threads of conflict were, and therefore what the key points of the resolution would become. Working all that out in the first 2/3 of my draft always made the ending much smoother when I finally sat down to write it.
Can you knock out a quicker outline of the ending or block out the key points, so that it feels like you’ve got something down to “complete” the draft, without writing a whole lot of pages you know you’re going to throw out anyway? Whatever will make you feel accomplished at this stage and ready to move on to the next.
Can you start writing the ending you want to write now, and then go back and write the beginning that will connect into this new section? If you know X needs to happen in an earlier thread, can you write your resolution as though it’s already happened, and then do the revising when it’s revision time? In one of my romance novels (Make Me Want), my hero started off as a scientist who’d been jilted at the altar. That was NOT working, so I scrapped my first 20K (sob) and made him a wildland firefighter. Much better! Only I kept the left-by-his-fiancée backstory — until about halfway through this new draft, when I realized that pain point for him looked shallow compared to the heroine’s journey. (It also bugged me that being dumped had nothing to do with being a firefighter, and if your book is about a firefighter there should be a fire, ya know?) I was on a deadline*, though, and didn’t want to go back and rewrite the damn thing AGAIN. So I just kept writing that first draft as though my hero had always been a single guy who kept to himself after tragically losing his BFF. Once I finished that whole Franken-draft, half with the old backstory and half with the new, I went back to page 1 and revised the beginning to match the end. I didn’t lose any momentum, but I also didn’t keep writing sections I knew I’d wind up scrapping completely.
*I have a great question coming up about how to write on a deadline!
I know I haven’t really given you An Answer. And by the time you’re reading this, you may have already made a decision. You may wind up doing some compromise between writing through to the end and stopping where you are, or some combo of the suggestions I’ve given, or you may have come up with a totally different, brilliant idea that works great for you (in which case, let us all know!). I’m confident, though, that you’ll find your way through not just this draft, but the novel overall.
So much of writing is about figuring out the conditions that best allow each of us to translate that nebulous thing in our heads into something concrete on the page. When we come up against these kinds of roadblocks, there are so many ways to climb over it and keep going. The most important thing is not to stop.
Good luck!
Kate
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