Saying Goodbye to the First Draft

Picture it: Boston, 2016. There was a young female—in fact, 3 years younger than she is now. She was in the midst of an MFA in fiction writing at Emerson College and, like most arts-focused people, had very little to do outside of her chosen art and playing video games. There were definitely times in that young girl’s life where she had forsaken writing for the aloof hobby that it is, but when she was in the MFA she was all in. She wrote in that year alone about 300,000 words on various projects both for professors and in secret. She drank coffee and Red Bull all the time. She feared the oncoming of carpel tunnel.

Readers, that young girl was me. And one of those projects… just got edited.

So what do we talk about when we talk about editing? See, the thing is, this whale started at 95,000 words when I picked it up, dusted it off, and said, “You know, this can be something. Just because it was an idea formed by my younger self, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.” (And if we’re being honest, a lot of my ideas were formed by my younger self — my sense of humor never grew up.)

I took the project on a long journey of hacking, tamping down, molding. Basically editing. It went from 95K to 80K throughout this journey and that son of a bitch is looking lean and sexy. I didn’t take out that much of the sex though, let’s be honest.

15K words of superfluousness. 15K words of didn’t need to be said. 15K words of what was I thinking.

Everyone likes to talk about killing your darlings like it’s such a big deal and, hell, it is, but only when Time has not tempered your love. Think about it, when you knock out a first draft, ratty as it may be, you see a newborn. A baby you made yourself without any pesky sperm getting in the way. Something your own. You’re not going to want to kill that.

But let’s do what my prof said once: Put it in the drawer for six months. If you’re on a time crunch, you could probably wait a bit less but you have to give yourself a substantial amount of time to love it less. That’s just the bottom line. Because when you pull it out again and read it through, like I did with my project from three years ago, you see that your child is a bit ugly.

Let’s talk about my child’s blemishes for a second.

For example, I spent a lot of this second draft paring down my wordiness and, basically, changing the narrative’s voice which not only took away a great repetitiveness but made it seem cleaner immediately. I’m a great proponent of setting the scene and I like to know where and what characters are doing, so stage directions are used often, and I continue to, but there was an overwhelming amount. I had to trust that my reader has enough imagination and willingness to use that imagination to fill in the gaps.

15K sounds like a lot, and it is. But it’s the difference between so much fat it doesn’t taste good to just enough fat to make you savor. If I had to say, between writing the first draft and writing the second, writing the second is probably even my favorite. Yes, the first draft can be ballistic fun and it’s private and doesn’t have to even make much sense, but the second draft is where your brain starts understanding what your heart was trying to do.