"Every First Draft is Shit."

I’ve finished both the first and second drafts of a nearly seventy-thousand word speculative science-fiction novel (whew, that was a mouthful).

Here’s the thing about editing; if your skin isn’t thick enough, it can be utterly soul crushing.

You’ve finished your first draft, which in itself requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. You’ve managed to get the metaphorical truckloads of chaotic information down onto paper and then you have to submit it for thorough scrutiny.

When I finished my first complete draft, I knew it needed a lot of work. I knew it was random and disorderly, slow moving in parts and terribly confusing in others, but I had no idea how to start editing. I hadn’t taken an English class in two years and it had been nearly six years since I’d taken a class on fiction writing. I was tempted to give up and afraid to ask for help, but I had a very supportive and extremely intelligent friend, Kathryn VanderWoude, who was more than willing to help. 

Kathryn is a literary genius. I’m not exaggerating. She’s humble, so she will, no doubt, refute me when I say this, but she is the most well-versed person I’ve ever spoken with regarding literature. So, when she read my work and said she liked it, I wanted to cry. This was just the confidence boost I needed.

We met up one day to go over her earliest edits and after getting a look at the notes, I felt lightheaded. The first page was drenched in ink. “Re-write” was scribbled in the margins every few paragraphs. I had asked her to be honest, and she was. Not only honest, but brutally so.

I took a deep breath, stared at the pages she’d returned to me and thought, “I can either give up all my work or do the re-writes and, just for shits and giggles, see if they're any good.” So, I got to work. I’m not saying that I got over the feeling that I was a hopeless failure because I didn’t. I’m still battling with it every day, but, in reality, it made less sense to give up than to keep going.

Initially, I began to make edits as I came across Kathryn’s notes, without having a complete grasp on the concepts behind them, but I knew this wasn’t good enough. I studied grammar books and came back so much better than before that I felt ashamed of my first draft. I’m not so ashamed anymore; I know it was all part of the process. Even Ernest Hemmingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”

When it came to re-writing sentences, I began by saying aloud what I was intending to portray with that specific line. Then, I’d write it several different ways so that I could not only pick the best sentence from a list, but start understanding which types of phrases worked best with my voice. As I dove further into editing, I didn’t have to list as much and almost innately knew what needed to be changed every time I came across a “re-write” command. So far, it seems to me, I may not be a great writer, but I’m pretty decent at re-writing and I think that counts for something!

Knowing what I know now, I’d never let anything like my first draft see the light of day. It was truly that abysmal. Even now, as I go through another set of edits, I’m finding grammatical errors, unnecessary words and wonky phrasing. But I’m learning and my manuscript is blossoming; this fact in itself is worth all the heartache I experienced going through my first edits and I’m glad that I didn’t give up.

As Thomas Edison said (all my opinions on his thievery from Nikola Tesla aside): “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

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