Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book

by Allison K. Williams

By the time you’ve gone through seven drafts, your manuscript will be in the best possible shape before querying, self-publishing, or hiring a professional editor. You’ll know, one way or the other, if it’s worth trying to publish your book.

But most of these writing missteps can be found and reworked by the writers themselves before spending money on professional editing or using up a “please give me feedback on my manuscript” favor.

This work is time-consuming and thinking-intensive, but it’s not a secret or a talent—it’s a set of skills anyone willing to go through seven drafts can acquire.

Whatever order you use, try to make it through a whole draft.

1) The Vomit Draft

Then let your manuscript rest for at least a week.

2) The Story Draft

During this draft, fill in placeholders and discover any missing events, random extra scenes

After the Story Draft, let your manuscript sit for another week.

3) The Character Draft

Point of View (POV) gets a careful edit.

Review the dialogue character by character. Make sure that each person sounds like themselves and that it’s pretty clear who is speaking even without dialogue tags.

4) The Technical Draft

Does each chapter start with a compelling action or image? Does each chapter end with both satisfaction and forward motion?

5) The Personal Copyedit

6) The Friend Read

Do not defend your book. Do not

assume their lack of understanding means they missed something.

7) The Editor Read

Let your book sit for a week or more between drafts.5 At least once, print out your pages; edit the manuscript by hand on sloppy, satisfying paper; and retype the whole thing6 so you can feel the flow.

When I’m reading a good book, the story plays like a movie in my head. If a book drags or is poorly written, I become conscious of individual words, aware of sentences and paragraphs. Editing your manuscript streamlines the reader’s experience so they can read immersively instead of noticing words on the page. Unpolished writing yanks the reader out of the world of the book. They are not moving forward in the story. They’re seeing typos or noticing what they “should” be feeling. Or they’re just plain confused.

Your brain naturally fills in gaps between the story you want to tell and what’s actually on the page.

The rules of writing10 make the words themselves invisible.

Rough writing is like crossing the street to avoid construction, every half-block, against the light. You’ll still get there, but the journey’s no fun.

Editing is wedding your passion, creativity, and imagination to technical tools so the reader connects deeply, personally, and viscerally with your story.

Developmental/Structural/Substantative Editing

Line Editing

Copyediting11

Proofreading

What you have there is a grocery run—a collection of items that will

eventually make a cohesive meal once you figure out which flavors go together.

The first draft is putting your ingredients on the counter to see what they’ll make.

But once out of school, writers rarely see the process of our peers.19 Writers, too, need to see how others work, and work near them. We need writing buddies to share shapeless early drafts with and reading partners who can encourage and critique.

Shitty first drafts aren’t the only way to write. Some writers prefer revising as they go. Perhaps some writers think through their stories so thoroughly, or outline so precisely, that when they sit down, the right words come out in more or less the right order.

The point is not that the first draft should be bad, but to not let fear of badness stop you from writing.

First drafts are barre exercises before ballet, scales before singing,

For narrative nonfiction, writing what we don’t already know is the whole point.

Writing what we want to know can be even more powerful than writing what we already know.

Even if your story springs from what you already know, examine your own assumptions and see what you can disprove. As you build the world of your book, notice where your curiosity draws you. What excites you to discover will also engage your reader.

Pick the project you’re excited about, especially if it’s your first book. If you make money as a writer and you need money now, pick what makes the most money the fastest. If you make money as a writer and you don’t need money now, or if you write for fun but want to make money eventually, pick the one you’re excited about, because you’re going to get to the murky middle and a project you’re half-hearted about won’t inspire you to push through to the end.

But no one else can tell our particular, unique, specific story.

Writers are seldom original. But we can always be rare. We must discover not only the general appeal of our work but also the nature of the story that is so personal, so intimate, it can only be told by one person.

But there’s a fine line between too much information and too little.

Do not open your exciting space opera with paperwork.

Whenever possible, avoid explaining details that can be learned from context.

If your writing style includes lush, lavish descriptions of setting, customs, and history, go for it, but know that you will need to write exposition extremely well to hold the reader’s interest.

when your story is set in a world that readers know, or have assumptions about, you can challenge some expectations and reinforce others.

But if we deviate from the facts, or set a lie in opposition to a truth, we have to know it, and do it on purpose. Ignorance is no excuse.

When a reader chooses your book from a shelf or uses “Look Inside!” for sample pages, they will mentally stop when they hit something “wrong.” They will put the book back or close the window.

Writers who blow off learning craft with, “It’s not the writing that counts, it’s the story underneath” may be deluding themselves that they are a special snowflake for whom packaging is irrelevant.