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