Mourning Your First Draft

One of the processes of revision is mourning the old draft of the book. This is one of the main reasons that you need to put away a book for a few months before you can work on it again and see it properly. Because all you see after you’ve been working on it for a long time is the time and effort that you’ve put into it. And that isn’t going to help you figure out what the book needs next.

In order to be ready to do a good revision, you have to be willing to throw out absolutely everything. Note: This does not mean you should actually throw out absolutely everything, although it is certainly a possibility. You have to see that parts of the book you once loved no longer work with other parts of the book. You have to be able to see that the book has changed in your mind as you’ve let it sit, and that things you thought were in the book are not actually in the book. You have to acknowledge that there are parts of the book that never ended up on the page, and that you still want those parts of the book in the book.

Loving your book is great. It helps you to keep going—except when it keeps you from making it any better. This is why people talk about how the book they envisage never ends up on the page, because if they keep thinking about the book as this Platonic ideal, then they can get the strength they need to keep carving away at another revision, and another. I, personally, never feel like the book in my head is better than the one on the page. The one on the page is basically the only one there is. I can either choose to keep working on it to make it better or I can choose to work on another book, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

I think it would be useful if writers groups had funerals for old drafts of books where they all stand up and talk about the old book and how much they loved it, and all the good things it did, how it inspired them to be better writers. And then you can put that old draft in a box and bury it in the ground, never to be seen again because it is dead. It is time after the funeral to get to work on the new book.

But yes, it can be very painful to say goodbye to an old draft. It can hurt on a physical level to reread a book you thought was perfect and see that it is decidedly not. I think all writers know this, and we should acknowledge it more to one another. Yes, writers who have been in the game longer are used to the process. We have our rituals for saying goodbye. We can sometimes get impatient with those who aren’t ready to say goodbye. But we’re just like the jaded ninety year-olds in a resting home who refuse to linger at a funeral because there are only a few years left to enjoy life and everyone’s going to be dead long enough to enjoy that.