You finished your first draft! Congratulations! This is a truly amazing accomplishment, and you seriously deserve to celebrate.
You also deserve to step away from your manuscript for a little bit (a few days, a week or two, even a month if that’s what your brain needs to get a fresh perspective).
Then, once you’ve celebrated, once you’ve stepped back a bit, it’s time to come back to your story and tackle the second draft.
Buckle up, because this is going to be a big revision. If the first draft was you telling the story to yourself, the second is about figuring out how to tell it to other people.
But here’s the truth: you’ve got this. You already wrote an entire manuscript, and you know your story and your characters inside and out. All you’re doing is making sure they’re as vivid and captivating on the page as they are in your mind.
This blog post offers a big-picture guide to writing that second draft. The tips and steps here will help you get started, and if you need personalized support along the way, reach out anytime. I’m more than happy to help.
Read Your Manuscript like a Reader
Before you even pick up a pen to change a single word, read your manuscript as if it’s a book you just picked up from the “new and noteworthy” section at the bookstore.
I highly recommend you print it out or download it to your Kindle or Kobo rather than reading it on your computer. That way, you can cozy up with it like you would a published novel.
Now, just read. Don’t mark it up. Don’t even take notes. Yet.
Let it Percolate
After you’ve finished, jot down a few high-level thoughts about your experience. What captivated you? What rubbed you the wrong way or left you bored or confused?
Write down your first impressions, but don’t do anything about them yet. Instead, let the reading experience percolate for a day or two. What scenes are standing out in your head as moments you’re excited to revisit? What character choice are you doubting? Are there any plot holes that are rankling you?
Celebrate the strengths and moments that resonate, and observe where the narrative might benefit from additional clarity or emotion.
Assess the Big Picture
Okay, now that you’ve got some general impressions, it’s time to get systematic about assessing your first draft. We’ll start with the big picture elements, because those are the foundation of your manuscript—so they’ll be the first steps in your revision process.
Review your manuscript with the following questions in mind:
Are my main characters well developed? Are their motives clear and compelling? What about their internal obstacles and limiting beliefs? Do their decisions and behaviors follow logically from their desires and insecurities? Do they change over the course of the story?
Are my antagonists equally well developed? (Remember, the best antagonists are relatable in some way—after all, they’re the heroes of their own stories!)
Are my supporting characters clear and distinct from one another? Do they each serve a specific purpose? Are there any that ought to be combined or saved for another story?
Are the stakes high enough? Our main characters’ objectives drive the plot, but the stakes are what add tension. The consequences for failing to achieve the objective should be real and severe — as close to life and death as possible. If the stakes are weak or nonexistent, readers will have no reason to care.
Is my plot strong and cohesive? Do the events flow logically from one to the next, following the rules of cause and effect? Does every scene and plot development move the story forward in some way? (Either by advancing the plot, nudging the protagonist through her growth arc, raising the stakes, or giving readers critical information.) Are there any major plot holes, too-convenient coincidences, or timeline snarls you’ll need to unwind?
Here’s a pro tip for if you find yourself getting lost in the big picture analysis. Get back to the basics and take a minute to define, clearly and succinctly, what your story is really about. This definition will be your compass so that, if you start to feel fuzzy about whether that character would really make that choice or those plot points are really necessary, you can easily find your way back to true north. (Download my free guide for help with this exercise!)
Assess POV & Pacing
Now that you’ve evaluated the building blocks of your story, narrow your focus just a little bit to how you’re telling your story.
Look first at point of view: Whether you’re using first person or third person close, limited, or omniscient, is your point of view clear and consistent? If you’re shifting points of view throughout the story, are your shifts intentional and timed such that readers will be able to follow along easily? (I.e., chapter by chapter as opposed to mid-scene shifts.)
And here’s the biggest question to ask about POV: Is the one you chose the right one for your story? Maybe you chose third-person limited but you want to be able to put a little more distance between your characters and your narrative voice. Or maybe you chose third-person omniscient so you could get multiple characters’ perspectives, but you’ve realized readers would benefit from rotating first-person perspectives. If the answer to this question is no, then you’ve got some tedious revisions ahead of you, I’m afraid. But better now than three or four drafts in, and your novel will be so much stronger for it. I promise.
Along with point of view, take a look at your story’s pacing. In your plot analysis, you looked at whether every scene is moving your story forward. That’s what builds momentum, driving your plot forward toward its destination. Pacing is more about how fast you’re driving, and it can vary from scene to scene to keep readers engaged—and, sometimes, to give them a minute to get their heart rates back down! So take a look at how quickly (or lazily or determinedly) each scene moves and check on a few things:
Does the pacing match the mood? A battle scene lends itself to a pretty good clip, while a romantic dinner gives you a chance to play with a slower, more luxurious pace. (Or, if the pace doesn’t match the mood, is the juxtaposition intentional? For example, is your anxious, type-A protagonist trying to rush through a relaxing spa day? That says a lot about who she is and what might be holding her back from her goals.)
Is there variation in pacing from scene to scene? Never has there been a better illustration of the importance of varied pacing (for me, at least) than the Eras Tour setlist. The order in which the albums was presented was masterful because, by balancing the boppier albums with the more contemplative ones, she prevented her audience (and possibly herself) from dancing themselves to death. I mean, imagine if she’d gone in chronological order and put Red, 1989, and Reputation back to back to back? Breaking those three up with Speak Now and Folklore varied the pace, letting the intensity rise and fall throughout the night. Check your manuscript for the same. If you have several tense, fast-paced scenes in a row, be sure you’ve also built in slower moments to let readers breathe—and to be sure those faster scenes get the chance to land their punches.
Assess Voice & Style
Finally, narrow your focus just a little more to look at your author voice and style. This part of writing, reading, and revising is so much fun for me—possibly because I studied poetry in college, and this is the point where poetry and prose overlap.
How does your writing style reflect you? What would make someone pick up your book, flip to a random page, and go, “Oh, this is definitely a [YOUR NAME HERE].” Look at the rhythms of your sentences, the themes that can’t help but work their way into your writing, the types of language you like to use. Highlight what’s 100 percent you, and make note of what’s taking away from your voice, too: clichés, generic or utilitarian prose that gets the job done but lacks your signature flair, etc.
(Not sure what your author voice sounds like? I have some great exercises for pinpointing that in my e-book, 20 Writing Prompts to Enhance Your Writing Practice.)
Unlike the other assessments you’ve done on your first draft, I don’t actually recommend you do anything yet about what you’ve found in this voice and style review. I recommend you do it now, before you start your second draft, because I want you to be able to keep your unique voice in mind as you write and rewrite. But, purely for efficiency’s sake, I don’t want you to spend time going line by line, enhancing your voice, before you’ve got all the big picture content in place. It would suck to do all that work on material that just ends up in your scrap folder for later.
Make Your Punch List
Got all your analyses done? Good. Take a break. Refill your coffee. It’s time to make a punch list.
I recommend organizing your revisions in layers. One big pass through the manuscript for big picture elements and then another for pacing and point of view. So really, your second draft will be the result of (at least) two rounds of revisions.
Go back to your big picture analysis, and convert your notes into actionable revision steps.
If you noted that you lost track of cause-and-effect at the end of act 1, the resulting action item might be to “rewrite scenes A, B, and C with a tighter focus on action-consequence-action-consequence.”
If you spotted a loose end floating around in your denouement, your action item might be, “Revisit storyline Y. Is it necessary? If so, resolve it.”
Once you’ve got your big-picture punch list all set, do the same for your POV and pacing analysis.
Action items might look like, “Fix the POV shift in chapter 6” or, “Loosen up the pacing in the breakfast scene.”
Get to Work
“Get to work” is actually a terrible heading to use here, because you’ve already done SO MUCH WORK. You’ve turned the nebulous task of “rewriting your first draft” into a step-by-step, process that you can now tackle one item at a time. Take a minute to celebrate that. And then, to phrase it more accurately, get back to work.
Let me give two rules of thumb, and then one exception.
Do not start draft two with a blank document. While you may be scrapping and rewriting giant chunks of your manuscript, I really don’t encourage authors to follow the common advice to approach draft two by “just starting over.” Why? Because, even just psychologically, opening that new Word document kind of pulls the rug out from under you. You’ve discounted everything that’s good and promising about your “shitty first draft,” and now on top of that, you’ve got to overcome the blank page all over again. I would much rather see you save a new copy of your draft and work within that.
Do the biggest-picture tasks first. Edits that will impact larger swaths of the manuscript should come first, because they’ll have domino effects into your other edits. If you tighten the POV in scene six, but then when you go back and rework your main character’s entire goal/obstacle situation you realize you don’t actually need scene six after all, then you’ve wasted your time and energy revising it. And that’s not the end of the world, of course, but I want you to be as efficient as possible with your limited bandwidth. Starting with the biggest revisions and then funneling down into the smallest is the best way to do that. (And it’s why I won’t combine a developmental edit with a line edit or a line edit with a copyedit for my clients. You ultimately save time—and, in my clients’ case, money—if you take one step at a time, and the biggest steps first.)
Now, the exception is if you’ve decided, in your POV analysis, that you’ve actually written your first draft in the “wrong” point of view. Arguably, this is the biggest-picture revision you need to make, because it impacts literally the whole manuscript. So, this could be a reason to break rule number one, open a new document, and just start rewriting from scratch. OR you could break rule two and not do this biggest edit first. You could, theoretically, revise POV as you go, pairing it with all your other edits. Need to rewrite the climax for character-related reasons? Go ahead and revise POV there while you’re at it. You will, of course, have to go back after you’ve made all your other revisions and rewrite the scenes you haven’t touched yet, but this approach could be less tedious than retyping the entire manuscript with different pronouns before you start your other edits. It’s really just a matter of personal preference.
There you have it: your guide to assessing your first draft and making a game plan for revisions. I know it’s a lot, but I hope that my advice for breaking it down and developing a clear and actionable punch list has helped make it feel a little more manageable—and maybe even exciting. If, at any point in this process, you’d like some one-on-one guidance, please don’t hesitate to reach out! I would love to hear about what’s got you stuck and see if I can be of help.