What to do when you finish your first draft

So. You’ve done it. You had an idea, then sat down and did the work to turn it into an actual story. You wrote a first draft!

Now what?

Finishing a first draft, especially if it’s your first first draft, can seem like a daunting task, so that when it’s finally over, many writers are left wondering what to do next. Can you submit it to agents? Should you start editing it immediately? Why not send it out to all my friends and family to read?

To help you navigate the exciting but murky time post-first draft, I’ve got some simple steps of what to do next. In the coming weeks, I’ll dig deeper into many of these aspects to give you a better picture of what to do with the story you’ve just written. While everyone has their own process and what you do with your first draft is totally up to you, there is a basic structure of what to do that seems to work best for most writers.

1. Take a break

This is an important step! You might be totally burnt out on your project after pushing through to the finish, and taking a break sounds great. Or maybe you’re itching to dive back into your novel and start editing. Either way, you need to put it aside for the moment.

Taking a break from your manuscript allows you to come back to it with fresh eyes and renewed creative energy. If you start editing it ten minutes after you finished it, it’s going to be much harder to be unbiased about what your novel actually needs. Letting your manuscript breathe for a little bit is the best thing you can do to gain the objectivity necessary to edit it.

How long your break should be depends on you. I took a month off when I finished my first draft. Some people recommend several months; others say just a couple weeks is enough. Ultimately, it should be however long it takes you to let the story fade a little bit in your mind (allowing you to approach it with fresh eyes) and for you to get excited again about working on it (particularly if you were feeling burnt out before). But just because you’re taking a break from your manuscript doesn’t mean you have to take a break from writing! You might need to, and that’s fine. Read a book or watch a well-written TV show. If you’re still feeling that urge to write, work on another project. In my month-long break, I read fiction books in the same genre as my work-in-progress, and wrote a short story. Do whatever you need to do to keep growing your skills and refill your creative well.

 2. The Read-Through

Once you’ve taken some time off from your book, it’s time to start editing. Again, the process will vary from writer to writer, but there is a general path that most people would tell you makes the most sense. The first step in this path is to just read through your novel, beginning to end. Do your best not to make any edits (though I couldn’t resist fixing typos and simple grammar mistakes when I did my read-through!), and instead just read your book like it’s the first time you’re seeing it.

Instead of changing things as you read, make a list of all the edits you’d like to make. Once you finish reading and taking notes, organize that list from the biggest changes to smallest. The reason for this is that you don’t want to spend forever tweaking the descriptions on one scene, only to end up cutting it later. This will probably happen at some point anyway, but organizing your edits in this way will at least prevent some of this.

3. The Macro-Edit

Now that you know what you want to fix, it’s time to dive into the edits. The first rounds of editing should be focused on the big stuff. As I mentioned earlier, this is to cut back on the amount of times you fix the details of a scene and then later delete the thing altogether.

In the macro-edit, you’re looking for big picture issues like plot, characters, and theme. Do the character arcs make sense? How is the pacing of the plot? Does the theme tie it all together?

If you’re an outliner who did a lot of prep work before writing, this edit may not take you as long, since you hopefully planned out a lot of these things beforehand, and were able to smoothly incorporate them as you wrote. If you’re not a planner and just wrote freely to see where the story takes you (or if you’re a plotter who didn’t actually plot very well like me…), then this stage might take longer. Neither way is right or wrong! It’s just a matter of figuring out what works best with your process and how to support whatever weaknesses you may have.

4. Finding beta readers

This step doesn’t necessarily come after you’ve completely finished macro-edits. Each type of edit will take you several rounds (each round creates a new draft) and so somewhere in the midst of your macro-editing rounds, you’ll want to find other people to take a look at your draft. At this point, you’re looking more for people with writing skill and an eye for editing, not just the average reader. You want them to be able to critique your work (without being too harsh, of course) so that you can know where it gets boring, when the characters don’t make sense, which scenes are unnecessary, etc. No matter how many times you read your work or how long you try to take a break from it, you can’t be completely unbiased, so it’s important to bring in other people to give you their opinions as well. You’ll also want to bring them back in some time during the next phase of edits to help you find smaller details to correct.

5. The Micro-Edit

Once you feel pretty confident that all the big stuff in your novel is ironed out, it’s time to wade into the weeds with the micro-edit. This involves going through your manuscript line by line to make sure every sentence is as polished and strong as it can be. You’ll need to ask questions like would this character use this word, can this verb be stronger, should this be in active voice instead of passive, etc. Keep an eye out for any “weasel words” of yours—these are words that you personally tend to overuse—or any other bad habits you know you slip into (I too frequently start dialogue with “Well…”). I won’t lie to you: it’s a long process. And it’s not one you can rush. But I sort of enjoy it, as it feels like I’m truly polishing my draft into something that is shiny and book-like.

The micro-edit will again take several passes through your manuscript, but after that point it should feel pretty solid, and maybe even ready to start sending to agents. That’s a whole other round of posts, and I’m sure I’ll do them once I start querying agents! But it takes a while to get to that point—I finished my first draft in May 2018, and if things go to plan, I’ll finish my last round of micro edits June of this year. Revision may not be your favorite part of the book writing process, but it is a crucial part to make sure your story is the very best it can be.

Have you finished a first draft? What is your method for editing and moving forward? Let me know in the comments!

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Featured image by Mikhail Pavstyuk