The small matter of making it great

I’ve written before on here about writing both first drafts (where you try anything and everything because no one will ever see it) and second drafts (where you cut away all the unnecessary fat and get a first glimpse at what your actual story is). 

Each one is a scary thing. Facing the blank page every day for the first draft, desperately hoping there are enough diamonds in the rough of the second.

And so I’m sorry to say the third draft isn’t any easier. It’s where, by some indescribable alchemy, you must take your story and make it great.

Hopefully*, of course, you’ll have a head start on this. You wouldn’t have begun the first draft without a good idea, and the energy and power of that will still be there. You wouldn’t have cut away things in the second draft unless they needed to go for the good of the story, so what remains will be pretty much everything you need to get a real book out of it.

So what’s the third draft for then? For me personally, it’s all about the telling of that story. I’ve set out my material as best I can, so now it’s my job to tell it to you in the best way possible. And this, I think, is where fair stories become good and good stories can become great (and – important, this – if you’re not risking greatness, why are you writing?).

For instance, I have an opening sequence in the new book that I’ve been pretty happy with since the first draft. I felt like I captured it how I wanted to, and when I wrote the second draft, I did rewrite and cut it, but not as much as other sections where I was exploring different things.

And yet something niggled, particularly toward the end. For the third draft (which I’m still in the midst of) I spent a good week going through that opening section again and again, cutting back more fat, making the action better, giving weight and taking it away, generally trying to make what I hope was a good sequence into an even better one. 

But I could sense – and it was no more than a sense, really, an instinct that you’re definitely going to feel more the more you trust yourself to have it – that something wasn’t exactly right, something was holding it back from doing everything I wanted it to do.

So I re-read it. And again. And again and again, keeping my feelers wide open, looking for where the thing was that was keeping it as merely pretty good rather than that one step further forward. And then I found it. I’d spread the energy of one key point into two lesser key points. 

The sequence would have worked fine if I’d left it the way it was. None of my second draft readers (only three, remember:  agent, editor, other half) complained about it or mentioned it in any way. But I knew – and I couldn’t tell you exactly how I knew – that it could be made better.

And I kept at it until I found out how. Then I took a deep breath, unravelled it, re-ravelled it into a better version, and there it was: a sequence that had, I hope, stepped forward from being merely good into being properly good. No longer words that will do, but words that feel like a real book, feel like a proper story being told, words that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed asking people to pay for in a book. If I’m right or not, well that’s up to you, of course, but if I’m not happy with it, then what nerve do I have even offering it to be read?

So that’s what I think the third draft is about. Taking what’s good and being brave enough to cast aside your timidity and try to make the bloody thing great. You might not succeed, but you definitely won’t if you don’t even try. And even if it you don’t hit greatness, you still might end up with something special. That’s what I believe, anyway.

Which is why third drafts are so harrowing. It’s scary being a writer to start with, but really putting yourself out there and saying, 'Not only am I a writer, but I’m good enough for you to read', well, that takes a certain amount of nerve. Without that nerve, though, no one’s going to want to read you. Why should they? You’re wasting their time.

So, swallow those fears. Call yourself a writer (terrifying, isn’t it?), and bloody well go in and make the damn thing great.

*By the way, I’ve officially misused 'hopefully' all the way through this residency.  It actually means 'with hope', not 'it is hoped'. Yes, pedants out there, I know this. HOWEVER, the great beauty of English is its malleability. Frankly, if everyone is using hopefully as 'It is hoped' then that’s pretty much what it means now. Dictionaries will eventually catch up. If you’ve got a problem with this, it's definitely your problem, sweet cheeks, not mine.