writing is rewriting

HOW MANY DRAFTS?

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment

How many drafts it takes to get your story to publishable standard?

As many as it takes!

One thing I know for sure after over two decades in the business as both writer and editor is that it is never just one!

If you’ve just written “The End”, congratulations on finishing your first draft. Books are huge projects that often take years of dedicated work. This can be less if you are writing genre fiction with established characters and story world, but if you want to make a work of heart-aching beauty, then it will take time.

The very messy first draft of 49 is a Dangerous Age! with some feedback from Vahida and my own scribbles!

Many new writers reach the end of their first draft, write “The End” and think they’re done. And of course, completing a first draft is an important and huge achievement. But it is not really the end. In fact, it’s more like the beginning. Sorry!

When you write the first draft, you’re creating the stone from which you will carve your beautiful piece of art. My old writing teacher, Amanda Lohrey, used to say the first draft was all about “excavating”. You are mining your life, your imagination, the story, for every little bit you as the writer need to know to create the book. But like a mine site, the excavation pile is a big ungainly mess – maybe a little less of a mess if you’re a meticulous planner, but it’s certainly not the polished gold or intricately cut diamond we envision as the final product.

Photo by Evie Shaffer on Pexels.com

A writing friend of mine, multi-award winning, published author, Kris Kneen, recently posted about cutting her first draft of over 100 000 words down to 30 000 for draft two. Yes, it’s true. Even a highly respected and experienced writer like Kris! But don’t worry. No writing is ever wasted because every word is necessary to bring us a thorough knowledge of the story and what it will become.

Many of my manuscripts have also been through the same procedure. The first draft was big and baggy, over 100 000 messy words, which then got chopped right down to a third of its original size after rethinking and discovering what the story was really about. If you can think through your plot a little before you start writing, you may be able to keep more of that first draft. But leave your mind and heart open to letting the book become what it wants to be. Each book has its own process and path. Trust in the drafting process to bring that book to life.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com Hopefully it won’t kill you!

Here are some general guidelines about the drafting process. These are not hard and fast rules, but don’t send anything out to publishers/agents or competitions or self-publish without doing at least three drafts, two of your own and one with input from another writer.

Find a writing buddy to share the ride – read and give feedback on each other’s work like Alina and Jen!

DRAFTING PROCESS:

  1. Draft 1 – excavating the story, everything goes in, go off on tangents, let characters have their way. Make a big, baggy, messy – keep writing forward till you reach the end. CELEBRATE ! Put the draft away and don’t look at it for at least a few weeks. 
  • Draft 2 – get out draft one, and read through it carefully. I like to print it out at this stage and read in hard copy, circling bits that are working, scribbling in the margins for possible additions, crossing out all those long boring stretches of introspection or repetition. Cut at LEAST 10 %. Then sit down and ask yourself, “What is this story about? What is it really about?”  Once you know, write yourself a list of changes, possible new scenes, perhaps a whole new plan and start again. Yes, you’ll be doing a lot of new writing – but this time it will be more focused. That’s Draft 2. When it’s done – CELEBRATE! Draft 2 is the toughest and now you’ve done it.
  • Draft 3 – once you’re happy with the latest draft send it to a writing friend or a professional structural editor/manuscript assessor. You can send it to more than one, but don’t overwhelm yourself. Three is a good number. When you receive their feedback, thank them, then sit with their responses for a while. Your gut will tell you what is right for you. Then go back through and redraft according to the feedback and do a thorough copy edit looking closely at every sentence as you go. Editor Judith Lukin-Amundsen once told me to cut the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Before you run wailing to the hills, you don’t actually have to do this. But do look closely at every paragraph, every sentence, every word. Does it need to be there?

Once you’ve done that draft you can start looking at sending to potential publishers, agents, competitions or other publishing pathways.

This process can be repeated multiple times – except the first draft, you only get to do that freewheeling fun once. The rethinking, getting feedback and redrafting can be done over and over again. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve done thousands of drafts of a story or scene – but I am prone to exaggeration!

How do we know when the MS is ready? 

A good sign for me is when I feel sick at the thought of redrafting anymore or when I’m afraid I’ll make it worse instead of better, and most of all when the feedback I’m receiving from writing friends is consistently positive. Friends and family members who aren’t writers don’t count, they’ll just tell you it’s “jolly good” or dismiss it because they don’t understand the work of each sentence. Find writing buddies whose writing you respect. People with experience who know the craft of creating good stories.

Don’t make the mistake I did early in my career of sending out uncooked manuscripts, fresh from draft one with a redraft checking the spelling. No no no! Give your story the best possible chance in this competitive marketplace by polishing it until it shines.

For more tips on self-editing SEE HERE and HERE.

GOOD LUCK with the next draft! Let me know how you go.

And wish me luck with Draft Two of “49 is a Dangerous Age” my coming of middle-age comedy. Gearing up to tackle that over the festive season!

As many drafts as there are mushrooms!

In other news we have only 2 ROOMS LEFT for our Heavenly Hoi An Writing Retreat – February 10 – 16/2025. Beautiful private rooms sharing a deluxe bungalow on the river with your own living spaces, including outdoor area plus kitchen and shared bathroom. NOW $500 off for our Black Friday sale! All the info HERE. Bring your writing buddy or come on your own and share with a new writing friend who’ll become a buddy! Come and join us for a comprehensive writing course in a beautiful location. Small group so you’ll get heaps of individual attention and feedback. Great Xmas present for yourself! We always have a wonderful time!

Lots of love,

Edwina 🙂 xx

RESURRECTING THE DEAD – Opening the Bottom Drawer

/ Edwina Shaw / 3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I have a bottom drawer full of old manuscripts. Actually, I have a whole chest full. The first novel I ever wrote, “A Lesson in Darkness” will never see the light of day, it was my real training ground. It’s never even had a second draft. But I have three other projects that were precious book babies at some point but then, because of rejections real or imagined, became too hard to look at and were relegated to the bottom drawer.

What I’ve learnt over my twenty years of writing practice is never ever to give up on a piece of writing. Short pieces that were rejected for years, even decades, suddenly find the prefect home in better places than I’d ever dreamed of. “Mrs Sunshine” had done the rounds of many literary journals and competitions and then finally found a place in Best Australian Stories 2014. Other stories too, battle worn and bruised have risen to be published and paid for.

Even Thrill Seekers was resurrected from the dead after Barbara Mobbs, my then agent, told me to forget about it, put it in the bottom drawer and move on, after it was rejected by only one publisher. I wasn’t going to give up on it that easily. I submitted it to a worldwide call out and scored a contract with Ransom Publishing UK. It then went on to be shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards. It wouldn’t have, if I’d taken Barbara’s advice and let it perish unseen.

It takes courage to resurrect old writing, especially when it’s done the rounds a few times and faced a lot of rejection. “Remember,” I have to tell myself, “rejection doesn’t mean the work is bad, only that it hasn’t found the right home, or the right shape yet.”

I am not short on courage. I feel the fear and do things anyway. You have to be a risk taker to be a writer. But reviving “Dear Madman” and starting to work on it again after a break of some years has taken all my strength. When a book has been rejected, it’s not just the book that’s bruised, but the writer (actually, the book probably feels okay!). Sometimes you’ll have a loving spouse to drag the manuscript out of the rubbish bin, as Stephen King’s wife famously did for Carrie, his first breakthrough hit. But sometimes you have to be your own loving friend and do the same.

I have been working on “Dear Madman” on and off for over ten years. Yes, that long. This project is dear to, and deep inside, my heart. It began life as a memoir about the murder of my maternal grandmother’s sister as a child in the Lockyer Valley in 1912 but then evolved into a novel. The characters demanded it. I couldn’t shut them up. Besides, I felt the story was best portrayed as I saw it playing out in my mind – in scenes. I thought it worked well, but publishers didn’t agree. My agent at that time, Zeitgeist Media Group, were tireless in their efforts but couldn’t get it over the line. The rejection of this manuscript broke my heart. I started to believe it was cursed. That I was. And that’s never a good idea.

Recently, I attended Kris Olsson’s Memoir Bootcamp at the QLD Writers Centre with more recent memoir projects on my mind. However, once I started doing some of the preliminary exercises, I knew that the ghost of “Dear Madman” had called me there. Kris inspired me to take another look, to redo it as the memoir I’d originally intended, keeping the novelistic scenes if I wanted. That was weeks ago.

It took those weeks for me to gird my loins in order to tackle what seemed like a monumental task, the most difficult puzzle of my writing career. How to do it? The question loomed in my mind larger than the book itself. “Just do it!” I told myself like a sportswear commercial. “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”

I dug up the old files, the original memoir strand of 24 000 words, journal extracts from the time of my researching and writing, and the novel it all morphed into. Then I started fresh. I opened a new document and called it, “Dear Madman 2022” (I know, I know, we’re not there yet, but I’ll still be working on it then I know). Most importantly I added ROUGH DRAFT in very big letters. “Just muck around with it and play,” I intoned like a mantra.

So I played. I’m still playing. Anything goes. I’m shoving bits in, weaving things together. Writing new bits, writing about the process. Talking to the reader as if they know how tricky it is to braid these disparate strands. And guess what? It’s fun! I’m enjoying myself. After the first few days of timidity and self-criticism, noticing where I’d overwritten and made things worse, I’ve reached a stage where I’ve regained my creative confidence and my belief in the project. YAY! It’s all a huge schmozzle right now, but I have faith that it is becoming more like it is intended to be. It’s finding it’s shape at last and I’m enjoying the challenge.

And, quite literally, I’m resurrecting the dead as I write, or at least giving them another life on the page. Through writing, I’ve given that little murdered girl the chance to laugh and play with her sisters one more time.

If you have stories or novels or memoirs clogging up that bottom drawer, especially those that hurt to look at, especially them, dig them out and expose them to the air. Gird your loins, put on your grown-up pants, and tell yourself you’re just going to play and see what happens. Start a new document and dive right on in. Anything and everything goes. You can do no wrong.

Repeat after me, “I am confident and capable in my creative work.” You can do it! Who knows? You may even have fun. 

What projects have you buried that deserve a second chance at life? What projects have you resurrected? Any success stories out there? I’d love to hear them!

Come and get it!

Lots of love,

Edwina xx