From First to Final Draft: A Case Study
David Louis Edelman August 14th, 2006
This weekend, I did something that’s guaranteed to strike fear in the heart of even the most accomplished writer: I looked back through the old drafts of my novel.
Every writer has a different method of rewriting, and there’s no one method that fits everybody. Some bang out their magnum opus in one draft, more or less; some take five or ten drafts. I tend towards the latter end of the scale. My book Infoquake took no less than five drafts to complete — and some chapters went through ten or fifteen revisions.
So today I decided to do something that sets my knees a-knockin’ even thinking about it. I posted all nine drafts of the first chapter of Infoquake online at my book website.
You can now see every revision Chapter 1 went through from its original incarnation as something I jotted down on a laptop in 1997 or 1998, to its final polished form released by Pyr to the public just last month (July, 2006).
And to those of you smarting from the occasionally stern paddle of Kevin, Kit, and Sherwood’s 13-Line Critiques, let me offer you this consolation: the first drafts of Infoquake royally sucked. You could power a small city with the writers spinning in their graves at some of that sucktastic, sucky, sucktious prose.
Now the point of posting these drafts is not to dazzle everyone with how wise and witty I’ve become. (Although if anyone is dazzled, I’m enough of an egomaniac to take it, no questions asked.) The point is that I thought writing neophytes might be interested in a behind-the-scenes look at what novelists go through in the revision process. These are the actual drafts of chapter 1, unedited, unaltered from their original versions (except to convert them to HTML, naturally). I’ve also added a few footnotes along the way to give some clue as to what I was thinking as I was revising.
And what lesson are you writing neophytes supposed to take away from this? Well, the obvious lesson, I guess, but also the most important: don’t give up.
Infoquake began as a fairly lousy, unfocused, rambling work with a few decent ideas. I’m sure its opening lines would have gotten roundly thumped by our resident 13-Line Critiquers if I had submitted them here.
It took me several years of work, with a number of discouraging periods of self-doubt in the middle, but I finally managed to get the book into fighting shape. And regardless of what you think about the final released draft of Infoquake — I happen to think it’s pretty damn good — there is one thing to be said in its favor: it’s published. By a real publisher. And it’s in real bookstores.
So now I’m curious about a few things:
- If you were my writing professor and I had turned in the first draft of Chapter 1 as my assignment, would you have encouraged me to continue?
- Do other people have books/stories that sold, but whose first drafts now seem unredeemable?
- Have other writers posted said drafts on the web for the world to see? I’d love to link to them if they’re out there.
- Was I absolutely out of my gourd to have shown Draft 2 to my then-girlfriend after only a month of dating? (And in case you’re wondering: Reader, I married her.)
- Was she absolutely out of her gourd to continue to date me, and to encourage me to keep writing?
On second thought, don’t answer numbers 4 and 5.
They have to say that when they’re dating you. Otoh, when I was dating the man who later became my husband, I asked him to read what was then my only complete novel, and he was, um, kind of honest. I married him anyway.
The first draft of JARAN is so bad that fortunately I have already donated it to a library (with other mss) so I never ever have to look at it again. It’s really really really bad. But the idea was good – it just took me many drafts to make it work. The published version of Jaran is 8 drafts and ten years of work later.
By the way, posting those drafts of the first chapter is enlightening, and useful. and quite interesting. There are forex some stylistic quirks in the first draft that have vanished by the final draft.
Had I read the first draft, I’d have told you to keep writing.
David,
The difference between draft 1 and draft 9 is remarkable. Thank you for taking the time and having the guts to post the 9 different drafts of Infoquake. This is an excellent demonstration of how important it is to revise-revise-revise and not to give up just because you have slung a lot of crap onto the page in an attempt to write a novel. Three cheers for you!
Kate
After you finished Jaran and submitted it to your publisher, was writing your second novel any easier than writing the first? Did the process eventually become easier with time?
Wow, I am in awe. I could not come up with nine complete drafts of any books. I do spiral development and revision, so that by the time I write the last page, the first half of the book is in really good order, the third quarter in reasonable shape, and the last quarter pretty raw. I keep rolling through the mid to end until I’m happy. That makes a first draft that’s pretty polished. Then I do one big revision pass and send it off. Of course, my first drafts take a very long time.
Carol
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