There should be a specific name for the exhausted celebratory euphoria writers can feel when we finish the first draft of a project. For me it usually consists of (a) thankfulness that I lived long enough to finish it, (b) a deep desire to sleep on a beach somewhere, and finally (c) the conviction that I’ve just written a masterpiece. (If you’ve never let yourself feel that last one, I highly recommend it—we need a reward for all that work.)
But then the exhilaration sloughs off, starting with the “instant masterpiece” delusion. We get some distance from the draft, whether for days or years. Every writer is different, but typically the bigger a project is, the longer we tend to step away before we can see it clearly. I like to call this the “letting the dough rise” phase because the dough of the project isn’t ready for the punch-down of revision yet.
But to say the project isn’t ready is a faulty metaphor, even though we tend to think of our projects as if they are entities that are conceived, born, and grow up. The words we write down don’t change positions on the page when we aren’t looking at them. It’s the authors whose dough needs to rise, even though we like to project that need onto our projects.
We need that rising time to let the emotional work we’ve done to create our first draft sink deeper into our being until it’s part of us. We need to see more of the world so we can develop fresh eyes to see our work with. (Revise means see again, after all.) We need to figure out how we’re going to organize the revision ideas that keep showing up on sticky pads and voice memos and turn them into a coherent revision plan. We need to figure out not when the project’s dough has risen enough, but when our hands are ready to stick back into it again.
The true goal of the first draft—whether wild, cautious, or in between—is to draw us back into it for further exploration. We can judge a first draft’s success based on one simple question: whether or not it makes us want to revise. This doesn’t have to be left up to fate or the muses, since only the writer determines whether or not a draft is worthy of revision. But first drafts have qualities that can make it easier (or harder) to work our dough again, and they are all connected to how we approach the project to start it off.
Some first drafts are so flawed we don’t want to go back to them, and those are the easiest to deal with. The most difficult are the ones we flail around in during revision because we’re unsure what we want revision to accomplish in the first place. Flailing is not romantic, and it can cause us to abandon projects or revise them endlessly. (As someone with two novels that had nearly twenty-year gestation periods from conception to publication, I can tell you firsthand how annoying and frustrating this can be.) If we want a revision process that isn’t excruciating, paying attention to what the first draft needs can help smooth the way.
I’m emphatically not talking about perfection here, either on an architectural or on a linguistic level. A first draft’s imperfections are what help us see how subsequent revisions might dig deeper, and a too-perfect one simply doesn’t draw us in. Certain practices help us create first drafts that we’re more likely to come back to. Here are three of those practices.
Make sure it is complete. A first draft that doesn’t reach its end—even if we know we’re going to change that end later—will rarely give us a smooth and fruitful revision process because our revision will consist of fixing holes rather than learning more about our characters. This often happens with rushed, “wild” drafts. If we find ourselves saying, “I’ll figure it out in revision,” then that figuring out will take up all our attention and cheat us of revision’s great joy: discovering things about our characters that we didn’t know yet. The boat that is our first draft will not be perfect, but it needs to be seaworthy. If it doesn’t float, then it’s not ready. If it does, we can be confident that it will stand up to revision later because we’ll be adding depth to it, not figuring out what it’s supposed to do.
Make sure it surprises us. If we want our audiences to feel intense emotion when they read our work, we have to feel it ourselves when we write. As my favorite Robert Frost quote runs, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” To achieve surprise in a first draft we need to commit ourselves to writing things we don’t fully understand, but want to understand. Even in a cautious and perfectionistic first draft, we can poke around before we declare ourselves done and find things to shake up. It may be as simple as letting ourselves be selectively wild, throwing hard-to-answer questions at moments when we know we’ve been cautious or controlling. If we aren’t surprised, then maybe we’re not really done with that first draft. Fortunately, we don’t have to start entirely from scratch to get that surprise. Just incorporating some uncertainty before we declare the draft finished can be enough.
Make sure it is a roadmap for further curiosity. A first draft should help you see the questions you need to ask about your people and your storyworld to write them better. Why won’t Jack talk to Jill anymore? What is Bob just dying to tell Ross? The more questions like this our draft asks, the more likely it is to draw us back into what made us write our characters in the first place. The less we engage our curiosity in the first draft, the less discovery there is later on. (Robert Boswell discusses this phenomenon in depth in his excellent craft book, The Half-Known World). A good first draft is like a map of an archaeological site in that it helps us identify the places we’re going to dig more.
There’s a showbiz adage that applies well to first drafts: “Always leave them wanting more.” For that draft, the “them” is an audience of one—the author who plans to revise it. If we create a good relationship with our first draft by giving it enough wiggle room to surprise us, yet enough shape for it to have an idea of what it is, then we can set about revision with an eye to deepening our characters and our settings. Unanswered questions are our friends, though ideally they are questions that run beneath the surface of our projects—what our people do and why—rather than questions of coherence. Ideally, creating first drafts that are whole, surprising, and able to lead us into further exploration gives us the freedom to make them their imperfectly useful selves.
