Photo by Matthew LeJune

Tips for Writers: Getting to Your Final Draft

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, short or long form, you need to edit your work multiple times. Writing is like clay modeling. First, you slap a big blob of ideas, facts, and feelings, onto your workbench (computer screen or notepad). Then you begin pulling away chunks, moving them to other spots, or throwing them back into the clay bin (your Ideas file).

The first draft is your blob, but even it needs structure. To switch metaphors, you can’t find your way through the forest without a trail map. So, if you’re writing long form (novel, play, screenplay, biography, documentary), create a good outline first.

The second draft is about major changes. You’ll likely spend hours on just a few pages, moving, deleting, and rewriting paragraphs, or even whole scenes.

The third draft is about details: phrasing, getting characters’ voices and mannerisms right, etc. How many drafts after this? As many as you need. Nevertheless…

Your final draft is the real make-or-break stage, and in some ways the most agonizing. Why? Because for the first time, and more and more with each read-through, you’ll begin to get a sense of how it flows. This is when you’ll discover whole paragraphs or even pages that interrupt the story’s narrative drive—what the reader experiences—and these will need to go, or at least be altered.

And it will hurt.

Three Key Elements to Focus On

1. Is it clean and clear of clutter? Or does it break the flow? This may mean cutting some genius phrases and sentences (toss ’em in that Ideas bin). Because, as Mr. Spock taught us, “The needs of the many (your readers) outweigh the needs of the few (you).”
2. Is it emotionally engaging? Does it make the reader want to stay up past midnight?
3. Does it contribute to the narrative drive? Hunt for tangents. Knowing our hero bought a gun to protect himself is on point; knowing about the factory where it was made isn’t — unless you’re building toward a shoot-out at that factory. The reader needs to sense that every paragraph belongs there, and why.

My Soon-to-be-Released Novel…

Healing River originally had a two-page flashback in which our protagonist began stalking the teenager who killed her son. “It’s just you and me, buddy,” she told her SUV. “You have to help me find Michael’s killer.” And then she recalled when, at her son’s insistence, she and her husband had bought the 4-wheel-drive vehicle so they could have off-road adventures.

I wrote a lovely scene about the three of them huddling together, snowed-in in the woods, singing goofy songs—their final outing as a family before her husband died. And now the last of that little family, her son, was gone. How befitting, she decided, that the SUV Michael loved should be her partner in tracking down his killer.

The essence was right. But the novel, like the SUV, went off-road at that point, and had to be trimmed. A lot. And that hurt. A lot. Still, the two paragraphs I condensed those two pages to in the final draft serve the story better–they contribute to the narrative drive. So keep reminding yourself…

“The needs of the many.”