A first draft is not a bad second draft. It is a thinking exercise, and it
should fail in ways that a second draft cannot fix.
What the first draft is
Getting words out. Sentences that are too long, ideas that do not connect,
paragraphs that repeat themselves, an ending that does not arrive until you
have written another page.
This is honest work. This is thinking on the page.
What the first draft is not
It is not bad because you are a bad writer. It is bad because the first draft
is not writing, it is drafting. A draft is the shape before the thing.
The mistake people make
They finish the first draft and reread it and it is bad and they think they
are bad. Then they spend the rewrite making it less bad instead of rebuilding
it from the shape they found.
The first draft found the shape: where the idea enters, where it climbs, where
it falls. The rewrite is not about fixing sentences. It is about using the shape
as an architecture.
The rewrite that works
- Read the first draft and mark the paragraphs that say something
- Delete the rest
- Rearrange the ones that remain so the good paragraphs flow
- Now write the connecting passages so the paragraphs do not look cut out
- Reread and mark the sentences that sing
- Rewrite everything else
The sentences that sing stay. Everything else gets rebuilt around them.
The draft I did wrong
Forty pages, took me three weeks. Reread it and it was bad. Spent two weeks
fixing sentences.
At the end it was better but still bad. The problem was not the sentences. The
problem was the shape. I was rearranging deck chairs while the ship turned.
The rewrite that worked was starting over: take the one idea that was any good,
use it as the center, build everything around it. The second draft took a week.
What I learned
The first draft is brave and stupid. The second draft is where you think. The
third draft is where you listen. The fourth draft is where you know whether it
will work.
If it does not work by the fourth draft, the shape is still wrong and no amount
of sentence-fixing will help.
The first draft earns you the right to rewrite. Everything else is working.