Have you completed a first draft and worried that it’s all over the place? Author and editor Gary Dalkin advises you on turning a messy first draft into a publishable book
You’ve got a first draft sitting on your hard drive, and frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. The first thing is to not worry. A messy early manuscript is perfectly normal. Good books aren’t written in a single draft, and its fine to have an untamed monster on your hands at this stage. So often writing a first draft is about getting your ideas down as quickly as possible, while the inspiration is fresh, feeling your way through the story, trying out ideas and getting lost in dead ends that at the time seem essential.
Faced with 80,000 words that far from add up to a book that anyone would want to read can be daunting. You might wonder if you have just wasted your time, and if what you’ve created can ever be any good. Everyone works differently, and the last thing anyone needs is me – or anyone else – telling you exactly how to write, so what follows are just ideas and suggestions that you can adopt or adapt or discard as you see fit, keeping only whatever works well for you. I’m going to look at different aspects of the path from a messy first draft to a book which has as good a chance of publication as you can possibly make it. You will make life easier for yourself if you are as organised as possible in your journey.
1: Seeing the big picture
This is all about how you can’t make something right until you know what’s wrong. Which is to say, there’s no point in tampering with the details of your manuscript until you’ve got the story, characterisation and structure right. Change the name of your heroine by all means, but that’s not going to fix a messy draft. To do that you need to step back from what you’ve written – distance yourself sufficiently to see the big picture. To see as objectively as possible all the things that need fixing about your draft as it currently stands.
Really, it would be ideal if you could see your manuscript not as something you had written, but through fresh eyes entirely. Through the eyes of an editor whose job it was to help you make the book as good as it possibly could be. That way you could be less protective of those things about your story that you feel really attached to, but which – and you might be loath to admit this – just don’t work. Or aren’t necessary to the story you are telling, or even get in its way.
This may sound all very well, but how do you
