You’ve written your first draft of your novel, wooo!
It’s a huge accomplishment, really. I hope you know that. Writing a novel, even if it’s an absolute dumpster fire of a draft, is HARD.
But what next?
You’ll no doubt have friends or family telling you to immediately publish your first draft. After all, you’re done right?
Don’t listen to them!
One, you can’t just go and publish it. If you want to go the route of traditional publishing, you more than likely need an agent first. And if you want to self-publish, trust me, your first draft is not in the right shape (yet).
Here’s what you need to do instead…
Leave your first draft alone
It’s pretty common advice to put your draft away and not look at it for as long as you can stand. I gave mine about a month and started working on another novel in the meantime. Some say longer than that.
You need to purge your writer brain of your novel for a bit. It’ll do your mental health some good and you’ll also come back to it with fresher eyes – which you really need for the next step.
Read through it (don’t edit as you go)
Get your first draft out of whatever dungeon you’ve locked it in and sit down to read.
One thing to note and this is going to be difficult. But your shiny new draft is not going to be perfect. It just isn’t and that’s totally okay.
Resist the urge to throw it into a fire.
Read through it all and make notes as you go. Don’t try to edit it yet. You need to get an overall sense of your story, your characters, setting, plot, and themes.
Pretend this is the first time you’ve ever seen this wondrous manuscript. That’s why a month or more distance is going to help.
What I did was I went through chapter by chapter and made notes on each. I made notes on the overall plot, characters, and setting. I didn’t worry about the prose yet.
- I made notes on:
- What I wanted scenes and chapters to achieve and establish
- Character motivations I needed to make clearer
- Settings and scene blocking I needed to make clearer
- Things that were missing
- New ideas to make the scenes better
I used Scrivener which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but having a chapter on one side of the screen and a little tab with notes in it was very helpful.
Journal about your story
Journaling is my thing. It’s how I work out stuff in my head, so when I finished my first draft, I rambled about it – what I liked and disliked, what I thought the major issues were, what I could do to improve it.
Any specific things I wanted to work on, I put in my chapter notes.
Do whatever works for you. This might be a big doc with loads of rambling notes or a letter to yourself or a bullet point list – whatever works for your brain.
Make a plan of action
Next, or as part of your journaling, try writing out an action plan of things you want to tackle first. You might want to go chapter by chapter or draft out new scenes to fill in any gaps in your novel.
Maybe you need to revise your story structure and move a few scenes or chapters around.
Whatever approach you take, it’s good to have a list to work through so it feels less overwhelming (actually I can’t promise that, but it’s a start).
Start your edit
Get your copious amounts of tea or coffee or whatever, and start editing. Take it bit by bit. You’re not going to edit the full novel in a day or a weekend. It’ll take a while to work through it.
Again, I’d recommend Scrivener for this but you can use a Word doc. I like to have draft one on one side of the screen and my new draft on the second.
I personally felt I needed to basically rewrite the whole thing. You might not want to do that. But be honest with yourself and decide whether you want to tweak or rewrite.
I found that rewriting gave me more freedom to try a different way to tell the story and I’m glad I did.
And yes it was a lot of work. But this is your baby. It deserves it.
Read through it again (and make notes)
Yeah sorry you’re not done yet. Give the full novel another read through and make notes. Again, you might want to give yourself some distance and come back to it at a later date with fresh eyes.
I hope you like your story because you’re going to be re-reading it a lot…
By now, you probably have most if not all of the scenes and chapters you want to tell your story. This is a good point to go deeper and refine the ideas you had.
Analyse for yourself how effective each chapter is for getting your point across to a reader who’s never laid eyes on it before.
Second edit
Hopefully, your first edit did a lot of the heavy lifting and now you can go in and edit rather than totally rewrite (if you did that). Try to be as objective as possible when reading through a scene and ask yourself questions like:
- Is this scene achieving what I want?
- Is there enough conflict here?
- Do I have a mixture of dialogue, action points and internal monologue?
- Could someone reading this through for the first time picture the scene?
- Am I over-explaining things?
- Is the dialogue something people would actually say? And if not, is there a reason for it?
- Does this feel like a trope or can you make it more unique?
One technique that’s simple and works very well, especially if you’re struggling with a scene, is to read it out loud. Any time you stumble over your words is a good spot to revise the wording.
Repeat as necessary
Re-read and re-edit until you are happy with your final draft. It won’t be your FINAL final draft likely but you want to end up with a draft that you’re happy for people to read, that tells the story, gets your message and themes across, and makes the reader emotionally connect with the characters in your world.
It’s a hard thing to judge. I’m currently beginning my querying journey and I know there’s still work that can improve this story. But for now, it’s ready for some outside perspective.
Also don’t worry if after three edits or drafts or even ten that you don’t feel happy with the story. If this is your first book, or even if it’s not, writing and editing is about teaching yourself how to write a story. It’s a long process and the learning doesn’t end.
I’ve rewritten this story several times now. It’s completely unrecognisable from the ideas I started with, while keeping a lot of the central themes. I’ve changed characters, plot, settings, history, all of it in what I hope is a better story now.
Get some feedback
This is perhaps the hardest part. All the stuff in your head going into someone else’s?! Will they like it? Hate it? Get bored? These are all worries that ALL writers have but you do need to get that more objective POV.
Try to find beta readers, friends or family and ask for the truth. What’s working? What’s not? What are the main problems – and be clear with them that truth is going to help you craft a better story.
You don’t need to take all of their critique on board, but be open to hearing other perspectives. They’ll notice things that you don’t because you’re too close to the story.
Any glaring issues they point out may prompt you to re-edit again and again until you’re happy to get to the next stage – whether that’s traditional publishing and querying agents or going down the self-publishing route.
Know when to stop (for now)
You can edit and edit and redraft and tweak until it’s perfect. But it’s not going to be. If you’re a perfectionist, this is a tough pill to swallow but at some point, you need to know when to walk away or at least make plans for your next stage (publishing or even starting a new story and coming back).
You could spend your entire life working on this novel. But if you want to build a writing career, you need to now when to stop and accept that this is the best you can achieve at this time with this story.
I hope this helps and I’d love to hear if you have another process or other ideas on how to tackle the dreaded edit of your first draft.
Best of luck on your writing journey!
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