Seven Steps to Your Second Draft

by Christopher Meeks

Making your work better is no easy feat—but here are seven steps you can take to help.

• Put aside your first draft for at least a day.
• To edit your own work, you must try to think as another person.
• Some humorous but true rules for those who want to "write an 'F' paper."
• Read your own writing in several passes.
• Save your first drafts.
• Save major polishing for later.
• Give your newly polished work to someone else to read.

Writing about writing is like talking about sex (or so I ponder as I look at my gorgeous blue screen). One can talk about preparation, technique, what to expect, and what to do afterward, but the act itself is up to you. The act is like the space between sentences, mysterious, personal, almost invisible.

In my previous column, I left you at the brink, telling you to go write. Now I assume you've done so. We're at the proverbial lighting-of-the-cigarettes moment now.

The thing is, the first draft is only part of the act (put that cigarette out!). You're definitely beyond foreplay, but I hear the voice of the man from the old Popiel Pocket Fisherman ad: "But wait, there's more!" ("If you call in your order right now, we'll throw in the brass-plated fish gut kit, a $9.95 value!")

Your first draft is the no-holds-barred draft, a place where you can entertain yourself, a space to play and where the artist in you can make a fool of him- or herself. You don't want to ponder your writing while you write—just as you don't want to ponder biology while you make love.

As Henry David Thoreau said, you need to write while the heat is in you. He added, "The writer who postpones his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." If you stop to figure out whether what you just wrote is great or not, you're losing heat, momentum, a sense of play. (Feel free to add any metaphor of your own here.)

The point is that you wear two hats as a writer: the hat of the creator and the hat of the editor. It's difficult to wear both at once.

This leads me to my list of suggestions. (I didn't start these columns with lists in mind, but numbering seems to work well on the Internet.)

1. Put aside your first draft for at least a day.The idea of waiting a day or more is to allow you to "be" another person, the editor, after you were the artist. It is difficult to proofread and edit your own work; a day or more between creation and critique helps.
2. I'm not the first to notice that I'm in a different state of mind when I'm writing a first draft and when I'm editing something. Each week I have up to 70 papers to grade from my students, so I can get into the editor mode easily. I "grade" my work as I might a student's. It takes a little more coaxing, however, to be that other person, the one who sits at the computer and writes, putting out of his mind the car that needs a tuneup, the kitchen sink that's leaking, and the tree that's growing so fast out front, it's starting to whack pedestrians. Now that I think of it, I like to write because I'm able to escape a little bit.
3. If you're a procrastinator—or a person who otherwise looks to the day of a deadline as a good time to start—then you won't have the benefit of your own fresh mind. My suggestion: You might somehow incorporate into your deadlines an extra day for your work to sit.
4. To be your own editor, think as another person. Not all of us are actors, so it may not be easy to be someone else, but someone else is who you must be. Think of your most persnickety high school English teacher—or think about your reader who has to be won over. The trick is to look at your work not as its author, but as a respectful but stern critic. Does each sentence make sense? In your longer sentences, can you keep track of the subject at hand? Do your longer paragraphs follow a single idea, or can they be broken into smaller paragraphs? Do you have a good opening and strong end? These are some of the questions you'll ask yourself.

If you need help in getting in that state of mind, read the following. A colleague of mine at Santa Monica College, Lawrence Driscoll, wrote and hands out two sheets of paper to his students each semester titled "How to Write an 'F' Paper." It mostly has to do with what you do after a first draft. Some of his points I'll share with you, as they apply to all writing, not just academic essays. You can quickly see the kind of droll and ironic sense you can have in being an editor.

How to Write an "F" Paper

1. Make sure your title is suitably vague. If possible, use a fragment like "Life" or "Memory," which gives your readers no idea of what you really mean. This will keep them guessing.
2. Never use simple language when a more complex phrase will do. Consequently, the mental engagement of your reader will be, pari passu, substantially maximized in the concomitant exploration of your cerebral peregrinations as their epistemological inquiry is fruitfully brought to fruition.
3. Deliberately misspell words to give readers a laugh and keep them amused. The moor the teecher laffs the better ur grade.
4. In today's modern information society, do make sure to fill your writing with cliches. Better yet, use a cliche and misspell it—a double score! For example, it is interesting to use a cliche about people having "low self-esteem," but how much better to write about a person's "low sofa steam."
5. Make sure that you have plenty of sentences that don't really go anywhere, but end abruptly. Let the reader figure out where you were going. Better yet, make sure that sentence fragments never quite.
6. Just to make sure readers are paying attention, try leaving out a or two. It keeps them on the ball.
7. Nevr proof reed. It wastes valuable tyme.

You get the idea. Reversing tone, let me add a few more suggestions for what you need to do with your first draft.

1. Read your own material in several passes. This is to say that it can be difficult trying to look for all problems at once. If you know, for instance, that you have homonym problems (too, to, two—you're, your—it's, its) then scan through your writing looking for just the words that you constantly mix up. If you know that you forget commas between two independent clauses often, read once just for punctuation. At some point, you'll make a pass on readability. Are there "awkward" sentences, those that are too long, or use too many big words? Are the transitions clear? You probably can write a list of things you often do wrong. Future columns will explore some other common problems.
2. Save your first drafts. Sometimes you as the editor are too harsh, and you take things out that delight or move people or simply make sense. My newest play, which takes place aboard a tug boat, was recently read by my writing group, and someone asked, "What happened to the letter from Howard Stern?" In a playful moment in the first draft, I had one of the passengers find a letter from Howard Stern. (Those of you into plays might consider this "Letter ex machina"). It had a certain humorous and emotional sense to it, but intellectually, I found no reason for it and took it out. Once this person asked about this missing section, others piped up, saying they missed it, too. Their reasoning swayed me. If you save your drafts, then you can retrieve material that you otherwise removed.
3. Knowing that you save drafts, too, gives you the freedom to remove "darlings"—those passages that are so clever, so witty, so superb, you love them—but they don't add anything, so you must shoot them. We all write those passages. Take them out. You might even put them in a separate file and save them for something else later.
4. Save major polishing for later. As you edit, you will often have what you think is a better idea, and you insert it. Recognizing a problem often brings with it the solution. Because you're in an editor mode, though, don't feel it's necessary to replace or repair work right on the spot, especially large sections. When I come upon whole sections that need polishing, I'll just write a note to myself that the section needs attention—much like an English teacher might bracket a section and add a note. ("See me.")
5. Give your newly polished work to someone else to read. There's nothing wrong with getting other people's opinions. You are not a failed writer by asking someone else to proofread your work—and you don't have to be in school to have someone consider it. Get a friend or relative to read it. Don't be shy. It's better to have someone you like save you from embarrassment than to close your eyes and turn it in without proofing.

Listen, we are all humbled by writing. Writing is like a mountain. You have to respect it, and one way of respecting it is to admit you can use an extra pair of eyes (or more) to proof your work.

After this point, you may get feedback and discover what you wrote is not being interpreted the way you wanted. You may discover that your "vision" is not being met by what you wrote. You will start getting firm ideas on what you want to change, what to rewrite—and you start the process over.

A few rare people finish their work in a first draft. Others require another draft or two. Yet others may go 10 drafts or more. There is no firm formula.

If you have to turn it in—there's a deadline—you'll at least have an intelligent enough version after a first draft and a polish. If you're writing fiction or a script that has no deadline, then there's nothing wrong with putting it aside for a while as you start a new work. You'll rewrite later. By putting it aside for a few weeks or more, when you return to your piece, you might easily renew your interest and passion for it and polish it until it's right.

To rephrase what Sergeant Esterhaus said on Hill Street Blues: Have fun out there. Don't lose your sense of play.

* * *

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), U.S. author. Interview in Paris Review (Flushing, N.Y., Spring 1958; repr. in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1963).

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), French theater producer and actor (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).

About the author

Christopher Meeks writes for and teaches creative writing at CalArts, and he also teaches English at Santa Monica College. He has published four nonfiction children's books and written many short stories.  His stories have been published most recently in The Santa Barbara Review, The Southern California Anthology, Rosebud, and upcoming in Writers' Forum. His first full-length play, Suburban Anger, was mounted in 1993 at the Playwrights Arena in Los Angeles. 

In August 1997, his play Who Lives? was staged at the 24^th Street Theatre in Los Angeles, and its good reviews have other theaters across the country considering it now.  The play earned several grants for its production, including one from The Pilgrim Project, a group that assists plays that "ask questions of real moral significance." For seven years, he was a theater reviewer for Daily Variety, and he wrote a column for Writer's Digest for two years.  His screenplay, Henry's Room, won the Donald Davis Dramatic Writing Award.

Illustration: from www.eyewire.com - Business Concepts