Since getting my book deal with HarperFiction, I’ve been juggling two writing projects: the copy edits of my first novel, The Lamplighter’s Bookshop (coming Spring 2025!) and the messy (read: very messy) first draft of book two (an unrelated, standalone novel – publishing Spring 2026).
And it has affected my writing in a surprising way.
Because I’ve never had to make such a close comparison between a first draft and a final draft. I’ve never worked simultaneously on a polished, highly edited version of my writing, and the Frankenstein form it takes when it’s a fresh, messy v01.
So today I’m going to take a look at how to deal with the imperfection of a first draft, and how to ignore the voice in your mind that says “it’s awful! Throw it all in the bin!”
Advice I sorely need, too!
I think the first thing (and possibly the most important thing) that needs to be said is that a first draft is meant to be messy.
When you write a first draft you’re telling yourself the story – and this is true whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, a meticulous planner or a “see how it unfolds” kind of writer.
No matter how much forethought you’ve put into the draft – you’ll have a much better grasp of your characters, your conflict, and your narrative arc at the end of your first draft than you ever could at the beginning.
So if you’re sitting there with a first draft as messy as mine: great work! It’s meant to be messy.
Now let’s take a look at what to do with that messy draft of yours, and how to stop the voice in your head from going “is this rubbish? This might all be rubbish. Should you throw it in the bin?”
1. Start big, start simple
The first pass you do on your messy first draft should be thinking about the broader strokes of your story. On this first read, you want to think about structure, character arcs, and whether you have all of the key ingredients of a great narrative.
My biggest piece of advice for this first pass is focus on functional. At this point, we don’t need to be thinking about perfection. Heck, we don’t even need to be thinking about good. This first pass should be all about one question: “Is it working? Is it consistent?” (Ok, that was two questions…)
This is also the stage in your edit process when the scared, doubtful, negative voice in your mind is likely to be loudest.
Put that voice in a box, lock it, and pop the key somewhere safe. We will only unlock it again when we reach step 6.
With your internal critic safely silenced, now it’s time to tackle some of these questions.
If you have time for it, try and do one read for each of these things (structure, character, pacing). I won’t have time to do individual reads, so I’m going to try and do my “big pass” all in one read, which means I’ll be asking myself the following question:
- Is the story easy to follow? Do I understand what’s happening? Have I left any “key information” in my brain, instead of there on the page?
- Is the pacing right? For the first pass this can be as simple as checking you have the major plot moments at the right spots – does your “big swing” of a midpoint come midway through the novel? Have you got pinch points flanking your second act? Does your third plot moment create a dark moment of the soul? You should be able to see this in your manuscript just by looking at the word count, but also try and read for it. If something feels slow, it’s probably because it is slow.
- Do the characters make sense? In my firs pass, I’m mainly looking for consistency in my characters. If I’ve opened on page one with a character scared of the dark, and then have them trekking through a jungle at midnight at the beginning of act two, that’s a problem. If they have a dialect in act two and not act three? That’s a problem. All I want on my first pass is for my characters to make sense. Their eye colour shouldn’t change midway through the novel (guilty!)
- Are there any glaring plot holes / timeline issues? The author who did the incredible (and detailed) copy edit on The Lamplighter’s Bookshop will tell you I had some timeline issues, so this is something I’m going to be looking out for in this first pass. I’m not going to try and fix anything, I’m just going to start making a little spreadsheet of what happens when in the novel. Fixing comes later!
2. Start to narrow your focus
Once you’ve identified some areas where you need to make edits for these broader stokes, start with the biggest thing, and then the next biggest thing, and so on.
Making line edits in your novel doesn’t make sense until the very last step. This first pass is where you throw out whole chapters – so don’t waste time perfecting sentences until you know those sentences are there to stay!
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So if you’ve realised that Act Two is 10,000 words too long and is ruining the pacing, cut that first before moving onto Your Protagonist’s Ever-Changing Eye Colour. I tend to make a list of all the things I want to attack, and then I’ll try and prioritise them in terms of “annoy-ability”. If I think a task will be annoying, chances are it means I have to change something in lots of different places in the novel.
Pop these towards the top of your list! And perhaps give yourself a nice reward for fixing them (I usually time a tea break after some particularly finicky edits)
3. Keep re-reading your work
After I’ve done a big structural edit (anything where I move events, chapters, or scenes around) I will try and do a re-read of the entire manuscript. That way, I am constantly checking that the edits I’m making are slotting nicely into the story, and improving the manuscript (instead of creating plot holes I’ll need to solve later!)
If you are really tight on time, then do a re-read of just that act. But you will want to check:
- Transitions – do you transition into and out of the flanking scenes / chapters still work with your new edits?
- Reactions to conflict – If you are moving scenes around, then chances are you are adding or removing information available to your characters. So go back and check Blue-Eyed Protagonist doesn’t start reacting to the break-up four chapters before it happens!
- Rising action – If you are moving scenes around, make sure you still have plenty of breadcrumbs towards your big plot moments. Don’t lose them!
4. Now you can do cuts
Once you’ve done The Big Manuscript shuffle, changed your protagonist’s eye colour another six times, and stopped Little Jeremy from accidentally dropping out of existence on page 93, now it’s time to look at places where your manuscript might be a little bloated.
You can do this mathematically if you’d like – have a look at the target word count for your genre, and then look at your manuscript’s total word count. Divide each by 4 – that gives you 1) your actual word counts and 2) your goal word counts.
Example with a 100,000 word manuscript (this is the top limit for historical fiction – but check your genre here)
- Act One should be: 25,000 words (mine is currently around 28k, so some to cut here)
- Act Two: 50,000 words (mine is currently around 55k, so a bit to cut here but not loads)
- Act Three: 25,000 words (mine is currently around 30k, so a chapter or two to cut here too)
Check for bloat by looking at how much “page time” each of your acts is using. For example, your first and third act should make up 50% of this word count, and the second act should make up the other 50%. Once you’ve wrestled them into order based on your current word count, you can apply the goal word count to your manuscript, and do the process all over again!
I’ll take a look at how to be ruthless with cutting in a post next week (advice I also need) but the best question to ask yourself is: What do I lose if I get rid of this? If the answer to that can be solved by adding a sentence or two elsewhere, then that’s a good sign you can cut.
6. Finally, polish
Last but not least, you can finally start to polish your prose. Is “unbecoming” the best way to describe this action? Is this character description the best I can do? Could I inject some symbolism into this scene? Is this the most beautiful way of writing this paragraph?
Now, and only now, can you unlock that box where you’ve been keeping your worst internal book critic hostage. In fact, this is a perfect job for your internal book critic, because it will ask all of these questions and more.
The important thing is that these are all questions you should only be asking yourself last. Once you know your manuscript back to front, and inside and out. Once you have cut, deleted, re-written, uncut, re-re-written, and possibly changed the protagonist’s eye colour a few more times, for good measure.
And a bonus tip:
To ensure that this phase of the edit comes to an end, and you don’t find yourself in an endless loop of polishing – give yourself a deadline, and be brutal. I’ve edited The Lamplighter’s Bookshop probably a dozen times, and I still find things within it I could tweak.
The trick is putting it down, putting it away, and calling it done.
Happy editing, writers!
The Lamplighter’s Bookshop – coming Spring 2025!
Scheduled for spring 2025, The Lamplighter’s Bookshop is my debut novel, a historical romance set in 1899 telling the story of Evelyn Seaton, the aristocratic daughter of a gambling father. The synopsis reads: “After she and her mother are made destitute, Evelyn secretly answers an advertisement for a bookshop assistant at the shambling yet captivating Lamplighter’s Bookshop in York, but she is not the only candidate … competition comes in the person of William, a charming yet enigmatic writer hiding secrets of his own.”
Sophie Writes 