How I Think I Write vs. How I Actually Write

Rob Kelley here, continuing to learn what my actual writing process is versus what I imagine to be.

One of the books that was the talk of this year’s Maine Crime Wave was Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. The title sounds so deliciously reductive. Three drafts? Hell yeah, sign me up!

That’s four drafts shorter than Allison K. Williams’ Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, a book I’ve written about before as a great primer on recursive editing.

But here’s the thing. Those three drafts? They are essentially three whole books. Bell advocates a second draft that is a complete rewrite. No line editing, no cut and paste. Write draft one, create an outline of the book it should be, then write that new book, all fresh and clean.

Seriously? No way I’m doing that. That’s insane. Who would even do that?

Turns out, me; I just didn’t acknowledge it. I’m drafting my third novel now, and after my first draft and some tweaks to the outline, I began editing it this summer. But it fought back. Hard. That book, the one I’d drafted, just wasn’t strong enough. In fact, one of its central thriller premises, the idea that generated the book in the first place, wasn’t working at all and had to go entirely.

I looked and saw that this book sucked. The voice of the protagonist? Too weak, not relatable. The villain, more interesting, but a little stock. The plot? Forced, even maybe cliche. My actual writing process? Not what I thought. In actuality it was: try to edit a first draft, find that it couldn’t be edited into the book it needed to be, agonize, complain, then admit to myself that it had to be re-written in its entirety. And, in actuality, I did this every time.

I stalled trying to do a second draft about halfway through the book, just as I had–I now realized–on my forthcoming book Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025), and my second book, tentatively titled Critical State. I’d drafted something I really liked, gave it a little breathing room, then came back to revise it and hit a brick wall.

I always encountered that wall and eventually found way around it (or, rather, through it!), and each time the solution was the same: a fundamental rewrite from scratch, a rethinking of the backstory, the complications, the ticking clock, the stakes for the protagonist, the agency and centrality of the protagonist, the subtlety and flaws of the antagonist. All the stuff that makes a much stronger story. All the stuff you cannot reliably do when you are first getting out the ideas that become your book. You get a few right, sometimes even a few in a row, but the structure that a reader loves, the slow burn, the reveals, the stakes, all require a more subtle hand. Only then could I see the angel in the marble and carve to set him free, as Michelangelo purportedly said.

It’s actually a fundamental flaw in my self-conception of my first drafts. I’m a plotter, so I like to think that my first draft is a well-crafted literary machine, already tuned and balanced, but the truth is, it’s mostly a slab of marble. Raw material that I then need to consciously and meticulously reorder, refine, reduce into a real story, a story that meets the expectations I had when I started that first draft. And that only happens when I hit that brick wall and have to face that my amazing first draft isn’t, actually, that amazing. Really nice marble; not a statue.

So this week, as I began that process of rethinking book three and making the hard decisions about killing a few, or more, darlings, I pulled Refuse to Be Done out from the bookshelf, read the section on the second draft again, and found it rang entirely true. Then I revised the snarky comments I’d made in my reading notes for the book to reflect the fact that I now actually got what he was saying.

And that second draft? It might take as long as the first one. Months. A year. Because then, and only then, will I be writing the book I actually intended to write.