After Editing: How Jason Hough Polished an Incomplete First Draft

The “Now What?” Months are here to guide you through the editing, revision, and publishing processes! Every novel is the “after” picture to the first draft’s “before”. Today, Jason M. Hough, author of The Darwin Elevator and the forthcoming Zero World, tells us how he turned his unfinished NaNo draft into a New York Times bestseller.

Plus, this Thursday, he and author Susan Dennard will be live-streaming their best tips for polishing a NaNo-novel draft! Donate to join them here.

The first draft: My two NaNoWriMo efforts, while both victorious, left me in very different places. The first year, I wrote a complete novel, by which I mean I finished with the words “The End” at 50,280 words. The experience was rewarding and hooked me on writing, but the book fell apart at the halfway mark. I only finished out of stubbornness.

The second year, I had a plan. I went in with an outline and loads of upfront research. I wrote 52,000 words that November, which only took me to the 1/3 mark on my outline. More importantly, I was stoked about what I’d written, and hungry to keep going. Still, I had to finish that first draft before I would allow myself to revise…

I recommend that approach, because your vision of where you want to take your novel may change drastically once fully written. I had no desire to revise freshly written chapters only to later delete them for pace or plot reasons.

You must come to terms with the knowledge that your first draft will be ugly.  Have confidence in your ability to make it shine later. Get the story out, step away from it. Come back with fresh eyes and start your revisions.

The makeover: When I revise, I start big. Major structural changes to the story, overhauling bland or one-dimensional characters, that sort of thing. With each pass I narrow my focus, until finally I’m just tinkering with prose. You’ll know you’re done when you can’t really decide if the changes are helping or hurting.

You know that feeling when, an hour after a conversation, you suddenly think of something brilliant you should have said? That perfect reply? That hilarious, insightful, or just damned clever quip? Well, I love revising because it’s like getting to do that over and over again.

Editing is the fun part of the writing process to me. Every hour spent makes the book appreciably better. Elegant solutions to nasty plot holes leave you feeling like you just solved a Rubik’s Cube in 22 seconds flat. Embrace it!

The final product: How did the final draft of The Darwin Elevator compare to the first? If I were to summarize the plot, they’d sound identical—that’s good, it means my outline worked. But I’d venture to guess fewer than 10% of the original words survived.

I cut sprawling, irrelevant subplots. I went from 11 POV characters to 4, requiring half the chapters to be rewritten from a different perspective. I wrote an entirely new opening chapter because once the draft was done I thought of a better opening scene (that last has become a trend for me, by the way). Most of all, though, I worked on the characters, looking for any opportunity to bring more of their personalities to the page.

And the payoff? That book eventually became a bestseller. 

Jason M. Hough (pronounced ‘Huff’) is the bestselling author of The Darwin Elevator, The Exodus Towers, and The Plague Force. In a former life, he was a 3-D artist, animator, and game designer. He began writing The Darwin Elevator in 2008 as a NaNoWriMo project. The book, his first publication, reached the New York Times Bestseller list shortly after release. His next novel, Zero World, is coming in 2015. He lives near Seattle, Washington with his wife and two young sons.