Drafts, Revisions & Feedback

This chapter is about how to deal with feedback and other tips for how to structure those revisions to your prose (or story in general). I already explained most of this right at the start of the course. At that time, I hopefully convinced you that all writing is rewriting, and you will have to improve your messy first drafts.

The remaining question is, of course, how to find and implement improvements.

Feedback & Criticism

You are always blind to your own mistakes or bad habits. Yes, you can read your own work and find flaws or mistakes. But give it to another, and they’ll find ten times as much. They’ll point out glaring issues you never even considered. They’ll stumble over the first lines of your story, but you don’t, because you wrote them and read them a million times.

So yes, always gather feedback. Gather it as much as you can, from as many diverse sources as you can.

Most improvements to your prose will come from others pointing out issues they were having. Most examples I gave in this course about my own stories, weren’t mistakes I figured out myself. They were things pointed out, sometimes repeatedly, by others.

What do you do when you receive feedback?

• You thank them for the time and effort. (Feedback is precious, almost priceless.)
• You write it all down (as detailed as possible, even if you think something is useless) and perhaps ask for more clarification.
• Once you have all the feedback, you assess.

I maintain two rules.

• If only one or two people say something is an issue, it’s probably just a matter of taste or coincidence. If almost everyone mentions the same issue, then it’s surely an issue.
• Your audience is great at pointing out that something is wrong. They are not great at proposing proper solutions to the issue.

In other words, focus on feedback shared across multiple people, and accept that those issues exist. But you know your work best, so you should find the best solution to that issue.

Criticism

Of course, criticism will also come after you’ve published a book. The best view on this I ever heard, came from a professional publisher that contacted me.

When people tell you what’s wrong with your work, turn it into lessons to learn for your next book.

You can’t change your old work anymore. You usually don’t even want to. You’re done with that book, you’ve done five drafts, it’s out in the open—you want to move on.

Don’t ignore all criticism. Also don’t consume all of it.

Most of it is useless to you, but some of it will be invaluable lessons. Pick the few criticisms that make sense and are well-reasoned, and learn from them for your next book.

It always saddens me that most creatives have those extreme attitudes towards criticism.

• They either say that everybody with a negative review is a “hater” or whatever and proudly declare they “don’t even check social media, ever”.
• Or they respond to every review and pretend that they are rubbish and everybody is right with all their negative comments, which will just destroy you over time.

The first type will never learn or improve, and will dissuade people close to them from being honest about real issues or problems with their work. The second type will be consumed by self-doubt and never create the thing they actually wanted to create.

Self-criticism

Yes, this is perhaps the biggest enemy of writers (or creative people in general). Self-doubt. Telling yourself the story is rubbish and maybe you weren’t cut out to be a writer—a chain of thought that usually peaks around the mid point of a long novel.

The solution is both simple and almost impossible.

Just … turn it off.

When writing your first draft, eliminate all self-criticism. You first need to get the story on the page.

When doing revisions, leave it on. Because you already have most of the story—it’s right there on the page!—it is much easier to deal with the self-criticism and to act on it.

Because that’s the crucial part: doing beats not doing. Movement creates movement. The only way to remove self-doubt, is by getting something done and making progress.

This is the mind-set you want to cultivate:

I’d rather write a whole book in a week, then throw it in the garbage because it’s rubbish, than spend years crawling towards the finish line because I think everything needs to be perfect the first time.

If needed, tell yourself this every day, or before every writing session. It will improve your life, seriously.

Or maybe you need a fun quote that looks at it the other way.

If you haven’t considerably changed your first draft by the time it’s the second draft, you didn’t do a good job. Nobody gets things right the first time.

Drafts & Revisions

The strongest medicine: time

Always keep a good amount of time between drafts. (Especially your first and second draft.)

Most authors recommend at least six weeks. Some recommend three months, or a “season”.

I’ve found that this depends on your writing speed. If you spent less time writing the story, you don’t have to wait as long.

Why? Because the aim of this “waiting period” is to make you forget all the details of the story. The next time you look at it, it will be like reading the story for the first time. As if another author wrote it.

If you wrote a short story in a day, then many details will be gone from your head the very next day. You only need to wait a few days, maybe a week, before you can revise that.

If you were focused on a story for three months as your full-time job, then yeah, it will take a while for your head to forget most of that.

So …

Wait as long as it took you to write the first draft, before starting on the second draft.

Stephen King is the one who said writing a book should take no more than a “season”. I think that’s a great guideline. If you make good speed, a book can be done much more quickly. But this allows time to get fresh inspiration, time to resolve issues or get over writer’s block.

Take any longer, though, and you will forget who characters are and what you were doing while you still need to finish the first draft. Which isn’t great.

A second reason for this waiting period is that you can get fresh inspiration. You can get new experiences and perspectives, consume other books or films. Whatever you do, keep reading and writing (a lot, at all times).

You will find that, once you come back to that old story, your head suddenly knows how to fix all the issues and what the story really needs. And most of the time, such ideas are directly inspired by that great book you read a week ago.

Focus

When I say you shouldn’t take too long to write the first draft, I really mean it. It’s not to put pressure on you or set unrealistic deadlines. It’s because taking too long to write a story is rarely a good thing, and usually a symptom of bad writing habits.

While writing your first draft, do not …

• Look at reference books
• Look up the correct spelling of certain words or that specific name you needed
• Try to already embellish prose by looking up synonyms or antonyms
• Get stuck inventing a name for a character or place; just put a PLACEHOLDER there and replace it later

All of these things slow you down. And slowing down is worse than being incorrect or incomplete in your first draft.

There’s enough knowledge in your head to write a basic story. Snapping out of it to use stuff you don’t need or aren’t familiar with is a bad idea.

Adding grace-notes, ornamental touches and fixes for plot holes usually happens after the first version is already done. Only then get out your thesaurus and replace some words for ones that fit better.

As Stephen King said: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

Cut big, then small

A common mistake is to get caught up in minute details before the overall story is solid. Enhancing your prose is, usually, a small thing that you can do any time. It’s usually one of the last things.

I, for one, have certainly wasted many hours refining prose … only to realize I have to throw it away the next day.

First lift whole chapters, scenes, storylines, and even paragraphs from the story. Only then start fine-tuning the details.

Cut any passage that does not support the focus of the story. It might seem nice to give a little more background on a character, but if the story is currently not focused on that character at all, it’s probably best to cut it. (Or move it to a point where it does match the focus.)

Cut the weakest scenes to give greater power to the strongest. Leaving weak or insignificant scenes in the story actually hurts the other scenes that are strong and amazingly written. It’s like a contagious disease. Readers struggle through one slow scene with badly written emotions, and the next scene—which does deliver great emotion—catches the same disease. It feels weaker to the reader, like a fluke, because they now imagine the writer as being incompetent.

Once you’ve taken care of the big things, you can focus on line-by-line editing. Most of the tips in this course have been about that: keeping your prose short, clear and rhythmic.

Next chapter will give my final tips on that as well.

Tune your Voice

Later drafts are also meant to make the writing more unique. To add some of your style or flair.

It is much easier to rewrite a cliché or bland sentence into one you love than to add your personal flavor to … a blank page.

In your first draft, it is fine to write the same “boring” or “predictable” sentences many times. This is how our brain works. It takes shortcuts and uses heuristics to work faster. You want to display somebody being angry? You reach for the same four or five sentences each time. You want to describe the night sky? You reach for the same metaphors each time.

Shutting down this system in your brain will only slow you down while writing the first draft. Keep it going!

Once you do revisions, you can take the time to consciously not take the shortcut. To find your own voice and reveal it in your prose.

Another important aspect here is authenticity. Many writers fall into the trap of writing things they think will “sell”, or “impress”, or be “trendy”.

Firstly, the life cycle of a book is too long to make it depend on trends or current events. When your book is finally published, that trendy thing probably isn’t trendy anymore. (You also can’t expect a long shelf life, of course. Once the trend disappears, your book is never bought again.)

Secondly, this shows. You can just tell, almost immediately, when a writer doesn’t tell the story that’s in their heart but the one informed by what they think they’re supposed to do. Not only does it mean a worse story that usually fails, it also makes me sad.

Write because you love the process of writing and expressing yourself through story. You want to follow a formula? Go for it. You don’t want to follow a formula? Go for it.

You enjoy strict rules around prose? Follow them. You don’t enjoy them? Break them as much as you like.

Find your voice, your writing style, your perfect story. Don’t edit it out—use it as your unique selling point.

Some of my friends are avid readers (not writers) and they all say the same thing. More and more, they’ve turned to fanfiction or obscure books. Because the big ones? They’re edited and made to conform so much that there’s just no personality left. No authenticity, no expression of something deeper, no odd but endearing prose. It all has to be perfect according to what sells, or whatever rules people invented, and it does not make it more fun to read.

In this way, a first draft should be very revealing. If the first draft has no odd quirks and useless tangents … if it shows no hints of what really matters to you … you didn’t write from your heart.

You have all the revisions in the world to finetune your voice and balance your prose between “what I want” and “what others would like to read”. To balance personal success with commercial success, if you want.

But tune your voice, don’t silence it or forget it.