3 Tips for Revising Your Sh*tty First Draft
First draft giving you attitude? I’m here to help with three tips that will help you conquer that messy first draft and turn it into something beautiful!
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As a pantser, I love my shitty first drafts. Anne Lamott popularized the phrase “shitty first draft” in Bird by Bird (you can also read her essay here) and I have wholeheartedly embraced it. In my world, writing a terrible first draft isn’t a sign of failure—it’s a sign of progress, a key milestone in the writing journey.
Your shitty first draft is a sign that you did the thing. You challenged yourself and got all those messy, magical ideas down on paper. Most people don’t even get that far. But just embracing the potential of your shitty first draft isn’t enough to get you through the next step in your writing adventure: revision.
When it comes time to revise, that shitty first draft can lose its lustre. The excitement of writing “the end” becomes despair at the amount of work still to be done. How can you possibly make your book work when it’s such a hot mess?
This post is here to help with three tips for molding your shitty first draft into something far more manageable.
Tip #1: Prioritize big changes first.
Whatever you do, do not set out to polish your sentences right off the bat. Why? That’s not what your first draft needs. Your first draft needs revision, not editing.
Wait? Aren’t those the same thing? Nope, not at all.
Revision and editing are two separate processes. Revision is the action of rethinking your story on a structural level. When you revise, you address plot, structure, characterization, character arcs, worldbuilding, and other high-level story elements. In contrast, editing is all about polishing your prose: fine-tuning your syntax, descriptions, word choice, and all those pesky typos.
First drafts don’t need editing, they need revision. When you reread that shitty first draft, ignore the typos and cringe-worthy phrasings. Instead, focus on your plot, pacing, structure, and character development. Let go of the typos, awkward sentences, and anything else happening at the sentence level. If you’re having a hard time letting go of those itty-bitty details, just remember that you may make significant cuts to your story.
Making line-level edits to scenes that won’t make the final cut is a waste of valuable time. Even worse, it can make it harder to let go of scenes that aren’t working because you’ve already invested time in polishing them. Save yourself the heartache and stick to revision-level concerns first.
Struggling to keep yourself focused on revision instead of editing? Check out my free minicourse the 7 Day Revision Kickstart and learn my exact method for prioritizing revision when you tackle that messy first draft. Sign up here and get started today!
Tip #2: Go back to the drawing board
When it comes to revision, nothing is set in stone and your writing process doesn’t need to be strictly linear, either.
At this stage, character development and worldbuilding exercises can help you build on the elements you’ve already created. Use these exercises to get to know your characters and story world even better. This method works especially well for pantsers who may not have done this work on the front-end. Turning to character and/or worldbuilding questionnaires can help you solidify the informal work that you did while drafting your story and forces you to make decisions when an idea or concept changed over the course of your story.
Building up your character development and worldbuilding can also help you flesh out parts of your story (particularly the dreaded middle). Learning more about your character’s backstory can help you amplify internal conflicts. Expanding on your worldbuilding can help you identify details that will make your story world come to life in draft two.
To help, here are some of my favorite resources for character development & worldbuilding:
Breathing Life Into Your Characters by Rachel Ballon
The Craft of Character by Mark Boutros
The Complete Art of World Building Vol 1-3 by Randy Ellefson
Tip #3: Be gentle with yourself & get help
No matter how level-headed you are in your regular life, all writers tend to approach the writing process with big dreams and wildly unrealistic expectations—a perfect first draft, massive overnight success, legions of adoring fans throwing money at you, Hollywood calling to turn your debut novel into a movie…
Goals are great, but you also need to accept the hard work that it takes to reach any of those milestones.
Be lovingly patient with yourself at each step from first draft to polished manuscript. When you get less than stellar feedback (and it will happen), remember that feedback is part of your journey to excellence. When you feel like you’ll never have a draft that works, remember that every author goes through moments of doubt and despair. They can be overcome, but only if you keep going and keep working to accomplish the excellent writing that you’re capable of creating.
It’s also important to remember that you can’t do it all on your own. Feedback is essential to finding the plot holes and lapses that we all miss in our own writing. If you’re feeling sorry for yourself, wondering why your editor or beta readers keep finding problems that you should have seen yourself, know that it’s completely natural for your brain to gloss over gaps—it’s literally part of your brain’s design (read more about that phenomenon here).
It’s also natural to need help with your writing growth. Think of all the things you’ve learned in your life. How often have you become great at something all by yourself? If you’re anything like me, not much. We can become decent at something by ourselves, but we typically need guidance from someone else to become truly great. That’s not a sign of failure. Just the nature of taking on a task as complicated and difficult as writing a novel.
I hope these tips help you conquer your own first draft revision journey. Have another revision tip to add? Let me know in the comments below!
Looking for even more guidance? Sign up for the 7 Day Revision Kickstart mini course today! You’ll get a week of actionable lessons delivered straight to your inbox. By the end, you’ll have clarity on your rough draft and a step-by-step action plan for revising your novel.
FYI: This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. For more information click here and thanks, as always, for your support!
