From First Draft to Finished Copy

Real early drafts, real creative mistakes

Writing a book, as I’m sure you know, is HARD and LONG and only occasionally as fun as that makes it sound. One of the things I was not prepared for as a novice writer was just how many drafts you have to write. I sort of thought that you planned out a book, then you wrote it, then you got to work polishing the prose to the most beautiful state it could be. And THAT was editing - taking a sentence like “The wind was strong and the sea was choppy.” and working it, over and over, finding little bits to improve and tweak and make more dramatic, until you got something like “The winds are high and the sea’s as wild as it can get, which is very.” Easy. Right?

No, wrong.

The problem is, there’s so much more to editing than this. Editing is not just the polishing of prose, it’s the whole positioning and focus of the book - where we start in the story, and from whose perspective, and the things about the story that we present as most important.

To show what I mean, here are five drafts of my next novel, Things We Lose in Waves. These represent significant drafts - obviously there was a lot of messing about and tweaking at every stage. But these drafts are captured at moments when I’ve changed something major.