What Good's a First Draft, Anyway? (Revision Pt. 1)

Note: I promised a series on revision, and here we are! This week, we start where all revision starts, at the first draft. I anticipate about 10 more posts in this series, for now.

Writers throw around a lot of ideas about first drafts. Anne Lamott called them “shitty” (sorry for the language, Mom…it’s about to get worse, those darn famous writers' mouths!)—a sentiment she may have borrowed from Ernest Hemingway’s observation that, “The first draft of anything is shit.”  Lamott, who became rather famous for her suggestions on permitting yourself terrible first drafts, also wrote, “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place.”

Terry Pratchett famously said the first draft is you telling yourself the story, which I find we don’t usually anticipate as a step we need to undertake. And usually, we’re wrong.

William Faulker said, “Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind,” and while I’m not entirely sure what the wind might be, metaphorically, that feels true enough. Joyce Carol Oates said “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.” Susan Sontag said her own first drafts have, “only a few elements worth keeping.” Bruce Coville wrote, “The first draft of a story is the writer’s clay,” and, ever practical, Jodi Picoult said, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

But this is your draft.

Is it really just clay? Is it shit? Is it practically worthless? Is it a hastily-built house? Only slightly more than a dirt floor with some shaky lean-to walls?

I think we’re tempted to skip revision not only because we’re subconsciously afraid we can’t do better (see my last post), but also because we know, deep down, our drafts aren’t all that bad. They were a lot of work, for starters, and we like them. And they just don’t seem terrible.

It’s important to remember all these famous writers weren’t making objective judgement calls about their work, either. I imagine the first version of The Sun Also Rises actually wasn’t total shit. I imagine it was actually pretty good. Maybe good enough Hemingway could have had it published and it would still be taught in literature classes.

But, Hemingway wasn’t judging his first drafts in a vacuum. He was really saying, “First drafts of anything are comparatively shit when viewed from the perch of a second or third or fourth draft.”

Because the truth is it’s only after you’ve exhausted every measure of revision you are capable of that you become aware of the delta between your first draft and your final draft.

When I was a kid, my grandmother, who was weirdly into rock collecting, used to take me to meetings of the local gem and mineral society. Occasionally, she’d pick me up on a Saturday morning and take me to polish rocks with her. I'm not talking about rock tumbling, where you set it and forget it. I'm talking about taking a slice of stone and turning it into art. There are special machines for this (called “cabbing machines”) where a bunch of wheels spin rapidly around, lubricated by running fresh water. You glue your rock on a stick, then take it slowly, slowly through this series of wheels, first cutting, then polishing your stone into a cabochon.

It takes ages. It’s messy (you get covered in rock-water slurry), loud, and the progress is incremental and sometimes invisible. But slowly, you start to see something beautiful emerge. Flashes of brilliant color in an opal, or the deep veining in jade.

At every stage, you’re tempted to think, well, that’s good enough!

And at every stage, somebody will come along and point out that your cabochon still needs work.

Your first draft isn't like the raw stone before you hit the cabbing machine. The raw materials are different—your voice, your idea, your story, your life experiences, your words, all the books you've read and dreams you've had.

No. Your first draft is like being somewhere in the middle of that set of wheels. You’ve glued the proverbial rock on the stone, you’ve hewn it into a shape approximating the story you want to tell, and some parts of it are undoubtedly already beautiful.

And honestly, you could quit now. You might even be able to do so successfully. But if you walk away, you’ll never know how much better it can get.

I should pause here to say I believe in first drafts as an accomplishment. On my worst days of revision, I was reminded by a friend that I’d already written a book. And indeed, I had! It’s easy to lose sight of that fact when you’ve now disassembled the thing and it’s in 8,000 pieces on your laptop screen. But it’s true. Getting the draft finished is a remarkable accomplishment. It’s likely that you could hand it to a friend at this point and they’d even be able to read it like a book (depending on how you draft). You’ve found and told a story, come up with a way to start and end it. These are accomplishments many others never reach. I think achieving this step alone is worthy of some celebration, whatever that means to you.

But when you look at your first draft after the heady blur of satisfaction that comes with finishing it, I suggest you look at it like that cut, half-finished opal—one where there are glimpses of fire in the milky stone. While there’s a part of you that just wants to be done and get on with your day, try to find the part of you that’s curious about the color you haven’t uncovered in the stone. About the depth of its sparkle. See if you can imagine the version of it that makes the most of the raw materials you have, and cling to this version of “finished.”

It's going to take time and hard work to get there. It will be messy and loud and progress may seem, at times, invisible. But if you stick with it, you may just find yourself looking back at that first version of your book and saying, like all those famous writers, that your first draft admittedly was pretty crappy.

Like I said, we’re going to dive into revision for the next few weeks. I’m planning on covering:

• Where to begin

• Macro revision (including structure, plot, causality, and character)

• Scenes and dialogue

• The case for rewriting

• Tools that make revision faster and better (and maybe sort of fun)

• Line editing and discovering your own bad habits

• Practical editing strategies and the “million passes” version of finishing

• And, importantly, how to know when you’re done

You Can See That Again! (AKA, An Intro to a Series on Revision)

One time, when I was a kid—middle school aged, maybe—I took a writing standardized test, and failed.

The teacher got in touch with my Mom to talk about it, because they were both initially perplexed by this. Writing has been my “thing” ever since I could do it (and even kind of before I could do it, as the stories my Dad carefully transcribed and typed out for me when I was three or four indicate…), and I’ve always been a strong test taker.

“She didn’t prewrite,” the teacher said.

“I didn’t need to,” I replied, with all the ego of a preteen wordsmith. And I was, in that instance, not wrong. Unfortunately.

The truth is, I’ve never been much for outlining, planning, or preparing. Sometimes I’ll jot down some bullet points so that I don’t lose track of them, but mostly, I’m a gardener. I cultivate ideas and tensions and relationships and watch them grow. I’m a pantser in the worst way—oh, hey, look at that turn of phrase I just made, I’ll say to myself. That’s not at all what I thought this character was about, but cool, let’s say that’s real. How does that play out?

And all along, this has worked out pretty well for me. I never really got called out for my lack of planning, not even during three years of an MFA. And because an MFA is focused on workshopping “clean” drafts, and only occasionally even “revising” them, I never got called out for the other work I didn’t do, either—the back-end part of writing. The postwriting.

Yes, if you haven’t guessed yet (and how could you?), this is a blog post that will kick off a series of indeterminate length about revision.

As I taught my creative writing students, to revise means, literally, to see again.

It isn’t about fixing comma splices and repeated words and spelling errors. Revising is about taking the manuscript you’ve written and seeing it with fresh eyes and new perspective and turning it into art.

Just like I was a pretty terrible outliner (and am learning, still, the price of this negligence), I was a pitiful reviser. I’d read and reread my work, shifting a few things around. Occasionally I’d do some cutting or moving around, but that was about as violent as my editorial work ever got.

And then I wrote this book, and I knew it had problems I didn't want to acknowledge, and I knew I could try to fix them, but I didn’t know how. It's a thing that seems to have been omitted, practically speaking, from ever being taught. Somehow we're supposed to just figure it out on our own.

And here’s the thing, friends. It was really, really tempting to say that this version of things was the best I could do. That it was as clean and solid and well-constructed as I could make it. After all, hadn’t I already done my best work, all along? For weeks, months, years? Hadn’t I already put down the best words I could find to tell this story?

I had! How could it possibly get any better when I'd already given it everything I had?

And that inner monologue became a striking craft lesson for me.

Writers don’t fail to revise because they think they’re all that and a bag of chips. Writers fail to revise because they’re worried they can’t get any better.

It’s not a conscious fear. It’s not like we sit around staring at the words we’ve written going, “Well, that’s total garbage.” At least, not 100% of the time. We like to say we believe in the potential for growth and improvement, but I think deep down, we each harbor a concern that this is as good as it gets.

Take, for instance, the common advice that you should literally, totally, from a blank page rewrite your book (This is advice we’ll talk about in this series, I promise). I think the real reason people don’t do this isn’t because they think it’s too much work. I think the reason they don’t do it is because they honestly believe that the version they’ve put down is the best they’ll ever do.

Why do I think that?

Because I thought that, myself. And sometimes, I’m still tempted to think that. And statistics would generally say it's unlikely I'm the only one.

I am ashamed to say that I was in my thirties and had already been teaching University Creative Writing, begging my students to revise their work, when I finally figured out that my work, too, needed revision.

I am not, after all, an exception to this rule I was teaching.

The realization wasn’t the slow seeping kind that I’ve had about other bad habits (like, oh, my failure to prewrite!). The realization hit like lightning. I wrestled with my plot and my book and my characters and suddenly, one day, saw new paths through the work I’d done that were fresh and exciting and tight and practically shimmering on the page with their potential.

And you know what? I didn’t feel bad that I hadn’t seen those things before.

I felt completely ecstatic that there was some way to make this behemoth better. To make the book everything I'd hoped it could be. I hadn't admitted to myself that I was worried I just couldn’t do it.

The simple reality is that I needed to revise it. To see it again. To put fresh eyes on it and bring all that I’d learned over the course of writing it to bear on its pages. I was a different writer looking at the manuscript from the finish line than I was in the midst of the journey, and that writer? Shockingly, she knew how to do things that the other version of myself didn't.

It is thrilling when you start to rewrite and revise and the story works like magic. It’s like someone erasing friction. Like being able to run without your knees aching. Like how easy it is to breathe when you finally get some decent decongestants.

You feel like a superhuman version of the writer you are, because you’re operating on an entirely different continuum than you were before.

This is my exhortation to you at the gates of my probably-needs-revision blog series on revision:

Give yourself the benefit of superpowers. Believe that your next version of your book Is going to be better than the current version of your book. Amaze yourself with how good you actually are!

Revise.

Re-see.

If you’re willing to try it, to be aggressive with your work in a way you haven’t been before, I can literally guarantee you—I’d put money on it if I had any!—that your work will get better in ways you couldn’t predict.

And no, I’m not leaving it there. We’re gonna walk through some of the revision tactics I’ve found most useful over the past year.Post script: I got to retake the test, by the way, because I was lucky enough to have parents and a teacher who really believed in me and who made things happen I couldn’t have on my own. And you know what I did? I wrote that essay without prewriting—then I wrote an outline of what my essay turned out to be. So…relevant details: A) I didn’t know reverse outlining was a thing.

B) Seriously, the ego. LOL. Who even was I.

C) I missed that early chance to stretch myself and see if outlining might actually make me a better writer. (Spoiler: quite probably. Note to self: DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE.)

D) Standardized tests are completely ridiculous.

Don't Be Precious

In undergrad, I studied acting. I’m pretty sure my study of and work in theatre has had a profound impact on my writing, and we can unpack that later. I mention it now because my acting teacher/college advisor/mentor/friend Richard Warner would say, all the time,

“Don’t be precious.”

It means, in essence, not to treat your art (or yourself, as the artist) with too much reverence. Don’t lose perspective on your art. Don’t forget the joy and play of it—don’t take yourself so stinkin’ seriously.

It is, of course, contradictory; we can’t be casual and ungentle with our work, or the work won’t ever be our best work. On the other hand, if we aren’t a little careless with it, a little reckless, a little wild and unpredictable, the work will never come to life.

An artist who can’t be a little reckless with their work never sees it finished. They never query that novel, or submit that short story, or enjoy a reader’s response to their words, because they never feel like the work is quite ready to leave the nest.

An artist who is too precious with their words takes themselves too seriously. They lose the fun of telling stories, of this particular story, of connecting with readers. They lose the spark of originality that could make their work sing.

There’s another part of being precious that means we’re too close to our work to gain any objectivity. This must be why writers are cautioned to put their drafts “in a drawer” and “get some space.” You have to be able to see your work without seeing your investment in the work.

All my words are getting in the way of my meaning. So let’s try this.

When I think of a non-literary artist who knows how not to be precious, I think immediately of Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy is a master of ephemeral art. He creates sculptures and paintings in nature, made from nature, that are meant to decay with time. He finds beauty, captures it, and then lets it go.

His work is stunning. Do a google image search. You’ve probably seen it before.

What’s really amazing is that all of the limits on his art (time, materials, place, etc.) force him to have a loose, light touch on the things he creates—and that loose, light touch, those limits, they in turn are what make his art truly remarkable. He doesn’t force them, doesn’t keep too tight a grip on them.

We could do a whole study on art by reading Andy Goldsworthy quotes, but here are a few I leave you to consider in reference to this idea of being too precious: “My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds—what is important to me is the experience of making.”

“When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression…I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world.”

“One of the most important aspects of my work is the element of discovery—both for myself and for viewers.”

“Mistakes are proof that you’re trying.”

“Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh.”

“Art is not a career—it’s a life.”

“All work, good and bad, is documented. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle…”

To spend much more time here, I think, would be a bit precious, actually. You can reflect on these ideas the same way I will, and let them inform your work. Or not! The choice is ultimately yours.

I’m going to work on holding on a little more loosely, on being a bit lighter in how I approach my work, in giving myself space to be imperfect, to let the imperfections and raw beauty of my own materials (my mind, my vocabulary, my experiences, my way of seeing the world) shine through the cracks in what I write.

This work of mine—it’s not precious. But the chance to create it, to give life to something in my head and share it with the world—that certainly is.