In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns explains why no writer gets it right on the first try and how writing is always iterative. He also explores the joys and benefits of the revision process.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #163 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #163 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
Speaking of hosting, this is going out on Monday, June 26, 2023, and if you are listening to it the week it came out, I am going to be hosting a webinar this Thursday, June 29, at noon, so you can attend during your lunch hour if you’re in the eastern time zone. We’ll keep it under an hour. This training is going to be called Secrets to a Fun and Focused First Draft.
On the webinar, you’re going to learn the three biggest challenges to writing a first draft when the lone wolf method of writing works and when it doesn’t have to be squirrel syndrome in the revisions Malstrom, which part of the six-stage book production processes the most difficult and why methods and hacks you can use to avoid overwhelm? Why an incredible outline isn’t enough to ensure first draft success, how to fit your writing into a schedule filled with family work and health goals. And much more.
It’s going to be a fun time; we always have fun in my live training sessions. If you want to join, register here.
All right. Well, speaking of drafts, on today’s podcast I want to talk about drafting and revisions. And the idea that writing is iterative.
My clients hear me say this again and again. I’m always trying to remind writers out there, writing is iterative. You get to that final draft via revisions.
I always say this to people, and I can always see this thing going on in their eyes… What I say to them is “No one gets their book right on the first draft. Writing a great book takes multiple revisions.” I’m saying this to writers, especially beginner writers, and they’re looking at me, and they’re nodding, and they’re going “Yeah, I know, I know.” But in their eyes—I can see it in their eyes—they’re saying to themselves, “But not me. I am going to be the one who gets it all right on the first try and who doesn’t need to do multiple drafts.”
Unfortunately, most people learn through experience that it’s just not possible. Writing a book, writing a novel is a complex process. It involves so many different elements, so many different things that you’re juggling at any given time as an author. And so trying to juggle all those things at once and get it all correct perfectly on the first try is impossible.
I own the “Hemingway Library Edition” of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. And a really cool feature of this book is there’s a special features sort of section at the end. And one of the things that section involves is all of Hemingway’s drafts for the final paragraph of the book. And I think it took him something like 32 different attempts to get that ending, and I mean, it’s one of the greatest endings ever written. It’s masterful, but he wrote it 32 times before he got to that masterful ending. And when an interviewer interviewed him about the process of coming to that ending and having so many drafts, the interviewer said to him, “Why did it take so many drafts?” And Hemingway said, “It was really difficult.” And the interviewer said, “What was so difficul?” and Hemingway said, “Getting the words in the right order.” And so getting to the ending of that book, for Hemingway, he was struggling with just the words, just the phrasing. And that’s just one element that we’re dealing with in any given scene in any given beat in any given moment of our story.
We need to allow ourselves the ability to say, “Hey, I’m going to come back and fix some of this stuff later.” When you’re able to embrace the mentality that you’re going to have to go through this book multiple times to get it right, it relieves the pressure of having to get it right on the first try.
So many first-time novelists struggle so much and take so much time to write their first book because they haven’t allowed themselves the opportunity to make mistakes to say, “Hey, I’ll figure that part out later.” Instead, they’re following that spark behind their eyes that says, “I’ll be the one who gets it all right on the first try.” But what you really need to be successful is the freedom to experiment and make mistakes.
Now, in one of Steven Pressfield’s books, I cannot remember which one it is, I’ve got to hunt it down, because I’m always using this number based on a quote from him. It was either in Do the Work or Turning Pro, one of those books of his. I think he said, “You’re probably going to write 10 drafts of your book.” And I think that’s probably right.
When I think about how many drafts it’s probably going to take to write a novel and make it great, yeah, 10 drafts does seem right.
When you’re a beginning author, and you have it in your head that you’re going to write this all perfect the first try, and then I’m coming along and saying, “It’s probably going to take 10 different versions to get it right,” obviously, that’s what you want to hear. No one wants to hear, “You have to go up to the plate and swing at that ball 10 times before you hit it out of the park.”
But the thing about those 10 drafts is they get easier as you go. I often use a bar graph to explain this. And so you’ve got an X-axis and a Y-axis. The X-axis is time and energy. And then the Y-axis is drafts of your book.
And that first draft, I’m 100% convinced, is the hardest draft. And so it’s up at the top of that X-axis in terms of time, and in terms of energy, people spend tons of time and energy on that first draft. And probably about the same on the second draft. That second draft is still a lot of work, a lot of effort a lot of time. But what happens when you get to a third draft, a fourth draft, a fifth draft, things start speeding up, it starts requiring less energy and less time to get a new draft of the book written. So when I say it’s going to take you 10 drafts, I don’t mean every draft is going to be as challenging as that first or second one. I mean, you’re going have to come back again and again, but it’s good to get quicker and easier every single time you do that. And I think that’s one of the reasons why revisions are so much fun.
I think writers who are trying to get it all perfect on the first try are really just trying to avoid revisions. And yet I believe revisions is really the most fun part of creating a novel. When you’re writing a first draft, you’re sitting down at the computer, you’re almost always writing chronologically, and you’re writing into darkness, you’re setting out on a journey into unknown territory. And there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty that comes with that. And a lot of challenges along the way. Maybe you’re working your way through a metaphorical jungle, and you’re really carving your path through one step at a time. And so yeah, that’s a lot of work.
But when you get to revisions, you’re able to follow your energy, you’re able to follow your interests, you can work on what you want to work on, and you don’t need to start at scene one and work through to scene 60. In terms of revising, you can start at scene 45. If you want, you can go where the area of the story is drawn you, where your energy says you want to work today.
And you can also focus on not just different parts of the story in a non-chronological order, you can also focus on different elements of the story via sweeps. As I said, you’re juggling a lot of different elements at any given time. And so you might want to do a draft of the book where you’re focused on one element, say dialogue. Maybe you’ve just taken a course on dialogue like the one in my First Draft program, and you’ve got all these new ideas and education about dialogue. You want to focus on that. Well, once you’re into revisions, you can do a sweep of the book and focus just on improving your dialogue. You don’t have to do dialogue and narration and plot and environment and all these other things all at once you can focus in on a specific element of your storytelling.
The thing that I really love about revisions is that almost all of the time, you’re making the book better. When you’re going about your revisions, you’re going about it strategically, you’re making strategic revisions to improve the story. And every once in a while, you make it worse, and it goes off track. But that’s very rare. I’d say, 95% of the time, when you’re sitting down and revising a scene, you are improving it. And that’s an amazing feeling.
It very different from that first draft feeling of writing a scene for the first time and saying, “I have no idea at all if this even works. I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t know if it’s effective or not.” There’s so much uncertainty with that first draft. Whereas when you’re coming in on revisions, you say, “Hey, I’m going to improve this scene today. I’m going to improve this element of the book today.” And it’s a very different mindset than sitting down and pounding out that first draft that could just be so painful sometimes.
Don’t be afraid of revisions. Writing is iterative; no one gets it right on the first tr. Go in there, fix it up, and it will improve. And that is a great and fun experience.
Writing that first draft is really about the unknown. And when you’re into revisions, you’re into the land of the known: you know what you have; you know what you have to work with; you know what areas need to improve; and you know where the story is going.
Much of a book is set up and pay off. Much of the second half of the book is a mirrored reflection of the first half, only opposites, thereby demonstrating change, thereby demonstrating something’s happened in your book. But it’s really, really difficult to write the first draft of a book and set everything up perfectly in the first half, and then pay it off in the second half, when often the ending is one of the parts that we have least figured out. And even if we know exactly where it’s going to end, that fourth act is sometimes really fuzzy, even when we’ve got our outlining work, even when we’ve sat down and said this, this, this needs to happen. Those are usually some of the scenes that are most fuzzy in our heads, especially because our outlines change during the drafting, we thought this character was going to be important, it turns out, they’re not we thought the story was going to go in that direction. It turned out going in this direction, which then requires changes to the outline.
Once you have a first draft done, once you have an ending written, now you can go back to the first half and say, “Okay, I know where this is all going, have I adequately set it up?” The point being, you know, what’s there, and you know what’s not. And it’s just fun to get in there and work with it and make it better. And so don’t be afraid of revisions. Writing is iterative, you’re never going to get it right the first try.
I think one of the problems with this is that revisions really aren’t emphasized in school. Even in university, other than a master’s thesis or a doctorate thesis, most of the time, students are cramming out their essays at the last possible minute, staying up overnight, trying to get it done at the last minute, and handing it in. And there is not this idea that maybe you finish that essay a week ahead of time before it’s due, and then maybe you write it three more times to improve it. We’re not really taught that; revisions aren’t encouraged. It’s not the norm. The norm is you sit down, you pound out your essay, you have a teacher, and you get whatever that grade is, but real life isn’t school.
Real-life luckily affords you the opportunity to improve and make things better and not just pound away on the keyboard and hope the reader gives you an ‘A’ and hope the reader enjoys it. You can go in there and strategically make it better via an iterative process.
Maybe it’s going to take 10 drafts, but you know what? Maybe draft nine is you think the book is done, and you send it out to a dozen beta readers. And five of those dozen beta readers say this part of the book just isn’t working. And so draft nine or draft 10 becomes going in and adjusting that one part that the beta reader group agreed wasn’t working. It gets easier. It gets quicker.
You’re making surgical changes by the end of the process, and I promise you it’s a fun and enjoyable process. So don’t try to get it all right on the first try. Embrace the iterative nature of writing. Go in knowing you’re going to write multiple revisions of your novel, and allow yourself the freedom to make mistakes along the way.
All right, I am going to be talking about writing first drafts at the webinar this Thursday at noon. If you are listening to this the week the episode came out, get signed up for that webinar here.
Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in. Hit that subscribe button and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
