How to read your first draft without hating it

Grab a pen and notebook and ignore all your instincts

In his Desert Island Discs episode, Russell T Davies says: “My head is full of fireworks and lines and spirals and noise and colour, and then you have to hammer that down on the page into letters and sentences and full stops, and it becomes so dull, something is lost every single time. Writing is an act of loss.”

Once you accept this, the rest is easy. Joke! Well, kind of. Every first and subsequent draft has this in common: it is very unlikely you will write the book you thought you would write. Each book has a spirit twin, the true, perfect version that you meant to create, and no matter how many times you redraft it, the spirit twin sits just out of grasp. Accepting your reality – what you have in front of you, rather than what you want – is one of those annoying things that is true about pretty much everything, including writing. But there are a few things you can do to help you on your way to a better second draft.

There are several things you should be looking for in your first draft, and everything else you can ignore, including grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. I spoke last week about how I always do a proper rewrite for the second draft, and I’d recommend it; this way, you feel as though you’re beginning again rather than reworking a manuscript riddled with problems. It answers the question: “Where do I start?” with: “Simple! Chapter One.”

Firstly, a celebration. Finishing the first draft of anything is a monumental achievement. The big question mark hanging over your reading experience is an obvious one: is it any good?

Only you can answer that, if you are its only reader, and at this point I recommend you are. Your response to this question will be instinctive, and it is important you take in the work as a whole, rather than focusing on a story arc here, a chapter there. Too many cooks might spoil the story, which is a fragile little thing, and as well as denting your ego might overwhelm you with ideas and advice. A general rule on this is if more than one person says, for example, that the love interest is a bit boring, make them less boring. If someone says they are boring and another says they are OTT, ie. offer opposed viewpoints, do nothing.

This is also my advice for reading back your first draft: do nothing. Yes, really. Print the manuscript or download it to your Kindle or phone (to do this, find out your Kindle email address by logging in to Amazon and clicking Manage My Content and Devices. Click through to your Kindle and you’ll find your email address there). It is important to not read it on the screen on which you wrote it. You need to trick your brain into believing you are reading something else.

By doing nothing, and simply reading your work from start to finish, resisting the urge to make corrections, tweak weak copy, pad out a scene with a few more interactions…you are imbibing it as a piece of work rather than work in pieces. This reading experience must be close to a proper reading experience. You don’t have to read it all in one go, but in a short time period is preferable so it’s all fresh. I usually set aside a day or two to do this.

Do not make notes. Do not open the Word document just to change one glaring error. Resist all urges to fiddle, fix, improve. Don’t think too hard about it. Don’t chastise yourself for clumsy metaphors, a thin main character, cringeworthy exchanges. Absolutely everything is fixable. Nobody needs to know.

When you have finished reading, sit down with a hot drink (or a hard drink), open your notebook to a clean page and write down your thoughts on the manuscript: anything that comes to mind. What you liked about it, what didn’t work. I approach this like a task list (I love a task list). It doesn’t need to be pages and pages long, and if it is, it doesn’t mean your novel is bad.

This activity can be intimidating and overwhelming. It can be depressing. It can also be exciting and energising. In the midst of a thousand things that need fixing, you might find a really well-done scene, or a character who feels real and authentic, or even just a beautiful line you’re really proud of. To begin with, I find it helpful to imagine a lane for each character, and think about their journey from start to finish. Things to ask yourself when you have finished your read-through are:

• What worked well?

• What needs improvement? (if the answer is all of it, or vague, that’s fine: I find things usually reveal themselves to me later, in idle moments, not always when I’m sitting down making notes)

• Did the characters feel like authentic people? Could they be more flawed ie. realistic?

• What about dialogue? Are there long chunks of text without any? Or long monologues (nobody really talks like this)? Dialogue keeps things fresh and on the page. Do the characters sound different enough from one another?

• Are things wrapped up a little too neatly? Could the climax be made messier or drawn out? This bit should always be longer than you think

• Do any of the characters drop out of the story for a while? Try and keep them showing their faces regularly

• Is there anywhere where the story seems to lose its way? Or feels as though it’s marking time until the next “thing” happens? How can that be avoided?

• Does the tense and perspective feel ok? I wrote Mrs England in third person, and as soon as I started reading it back knew almost instantly it ought to be in first

• Did the story have momentum, a sense of moving forwards at all times?

• Is there the sense that other things could happen? That your main character or character is making active choices in their journey and isn’t just driftwood bobbing along on the tide?

• Is there too much exposition? This is when a person’s backstory, or any other context, is just presented verbatim. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but could some of it be eked out in the plot, or revealed to another character in a moment that drives the plot forward?

• Likewise, too much description or showy-off writing?

• Are some of the supporting cast of characters too similar and potentially indistinguishable to a reader who isn’t you? I find this happens with characters’ friends sometimes: could you combine two into one?

• Which were the baggy bits? Why were they baggy and what can you do to tighten them up: cut completely or chop up and sprinkle elsewhere? (In The Familiars, I cut a good 10,000 words where the main characters, Fleetwood and Alice, went to London because…well, they just didn’t need to. What happened in London I just recycled into the plot)

• Most importantly, did you find yourself wanting to keep reading?

If all this feels daunting, it is. If it’s putting you off another draft altogether, know that that’s normal, too. Reading back your first draft is a bit like being forced to scrutinise yourself in the mirror at length, naked, from every angle. It’s like this for everyone.

One of my best tips for looking at what needs doing to a first draft is the “more or less” theory. Often it’s not necessary to completely overhaul a storyline or character relationship. Does it need more suspense? Fewer scenes with a specific character? More drama? Less action up front?

“Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett’s quote is often wheeled out in this line of work, but being a writer is understanding that success and failure are cut from the same cloth. Every writer knows that first drafts are rough, messy, flawed creations, but deep down we feel as though ours should be great, especially if this is the third, seventh, fifteenth time we’re doing it.

As a published writer, you have to get used to doing things over and over: reading your manuscript so many times it makes no sense, and answering the same questions at events. And not even events: each time I tell somebody who asks what I do for work, I can guarantee they will ask one of the following: “What are your books about?/Have I heard of you?/Where do you get your ideas from?”

The trick is novelty and refinement: find something new to say each time, while honing your response.

Once you’ve hashed out how you feel about draft one, it’s time to hold all of that within you and carry it like a full glass of water to the next draft, where hopefully it will spill through your fingertips.

Don’t be afraid to begin again. There is a freedom and possibility to starting from scratch that you don’t get from working over the top of a finished draft.

And if you have already reached this point, well done. You got this far when so many don’t.

Going forward

It feels appropriate to finish talking about first drafts, because from next week we’ll be focusing on the first draft of The Household. I’ll start with the synopsis, and then I’ll be sharing excerpts from the manuscript as PDF documents, so you can really get stuck in. For this reason, from 12 April, no posts will be free. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Housekeeping so far and will continue on this next part of the journey, but if you don’t, thanks so much for sticking around until now.

Every week, I’ll be critiquing my own work and breaking down the process, so I’d recommend reading the book first. Did I mention it’s out in two weeks?! We’ll be getting quite technical with plot, so there will be spoilers. I’ll always flag these in advance, though. You might find it helpful to reference your copy once you’ve read each week’s post, to see how things have changed. Sometimes it will be a little, sometimes a lot.

By the way, I don’t think the final published version of The Household is perfect and faultless. I find it much easier to read my first drafts back because I don’t mind picking those apart. The published versions are a little tricker because I’d still make changes to probably every page as well as the work as a whole. But I can’t! Such is life. There is a joy, a sense of relief, in it being done, finished, free to fly or flop(!). But making a writer read back their published work is quite acutely painful. I don’t mind it being out there, separate from me, as long as I’m not reading it. Of course there are things I’d still do, improvements I’d make, with the benefit of time and space away from it. But as long as it’s good enough, that’s ok. See you next week.