Making the Most of Your First Draft

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Dabble, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is an easy-to-use writing tool that lets you organize, plot, and create amazing stories. Today, they’ve teamed up with author and editor Chet Sandberg to bring you some advice for getting the most out of your first draft:

Every year, thousands of first time novelists reach the end of November with +/-50k words and savor the victory of finally finishing something. Perhaps you’ll be one of them!

You take a day, or maybe you take a week, to bathe in the adulation of your fellows, many of whom also completed their manuscripts, along with many who didn’t. Then, you freeze. What’s the next step?

This post is dedicated to helping you get a first draft that, no matter how loosey-goosey or clinical your writing approach, serves as a basis for a great final manuscript.

Turning points: give your scenes movement.

This suggestion is one I haven’t seen elsewhere, but it’s something I do in all my drafts now that I’ve stumbled into it. It works especially well for pantsers or discovery writers, but most plotters I know have deviations from their plots, or they don’t plot the polarity of each of their chapters. Polarity is the movement from a positive overall situation (or at least a stable one) to a negative overall situation, or vice versa. This movement may be strictly external—that is, strictly plot—or it may be internal/emotional. It also may involve the movement from negative to even more negative, or (though this is rare in gripping fiction) from positive to more positive. While you see storycraft experts talk about these polarity shifts, I rarely see anyone mention a system for making them easy to locate and manipulate in further drafts.

As you write, mark critical turning points in the plot or emotional tone of your novel. These will be points where the polarity shifts. Where do your scenes turn? Where does a significant misfortune or internal change in the character make even you—the writer who’s writing the book—wonder what will happen next? Many of these turning points have proper names and descriptions—the inciting incident, as an example—in storytelling craft, and you may or may not recognize, from the first time you see it, exactly what that turn is. That doesn’t matter yet. What matters is that it sticks out. 

When you revisit this first draft, it’ll be invaluable to have critical points marked and easy to find. I use composition software, Dabble Writer (dabblewriter.com), that makes this quite simple. Other manuscript software programs such as Scrivener have these features, too, but I haven’t found one yet that fits my process while still being as easy to use as Dabble. In Dabble, I can simply start a new plot in the plot grid and call it “turning points.” When I note a turning point as I’m writing, I highlight it within the scene (something Dabble makes easy), but I also create a card in the grid for that chapter that shows up in the right margin of that scene. I fill out the “turning points” grid card with a brief description of the turning point, along with any thoughts I have when I first see the turning point. 

Noting turnarounds within individual chapters works particularly well in helping you note where to end chapters, too. Often, a new author will create chapters that end three or four hundred words past when they should, essentially deflating the tension before the scene ends. Marking those emotional or plot highlights that make you curious or anxious about the POV character will help you spot these crucial turns and avoid neutralizing the polarity before the chapter ends. While not every scene can have drastic polarity swings (unless you’re intentionally writing melodrama), you still often want some sort of polarity shift to compel the reader on to the next chapter.

I’ve often said, “Verbs are the lifeblood of all prose.” While that’s true for the nuts and bolts syntax of writing, polarity shifts or turnarounds are similarly important for the storytelling aspects of writing. Fiction that lacks internal or external turnarounds—i.e., polarity shifts—is hard to pull off without an incredibly powerful voice. Such feats are usually reserved for experimental prose, not mainstream storytelling.

If verbs are the lifeblood of prose, turnarounds and polarity shifts are the edges of your story. They give shape to your characters’ journeys. Knowing where they are, vetting them, and finally sharpening them, is essential to good storytelling. Marking them within your manuscript as you go will make the task of creating a coherent second draft much easier. Future you will be thankful for such foresight.

Chet Sandberg is a hospice nurse, freelance line editor, and sporadically published author. Find him at world.hey.com/chetcraft/ where he often posts about writing and storytelling craft. His Twitter handle is @Chet_Novels. The software he mentions, Dabble Writer, may be found at dabblewriter.com.

Top photo by Weston MacKinnon on Unsplash.