The Editing Process

Very often when working on a new piece of writing or when you are reading a book, you might think, “How do I make my writing sound like this? How does my story get from a mess of notes to a polished work worth submitting for publication?” This used to be something I would moan about as a student because I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Luckily, the best writing advice is to just start writing! As you write, first drafts are always going to be messy and have mistakes. That’s why it’s a first draft. Then comes rounds of editing to turn the draft into a final piece.

Today I wanted to share one of my old commissions with you to show how messy they can be in their earlier drafts compared to the final result. I’ll pick out some fun tips to share as well, based on the mistakes I made in my first draft.

What is a Rough Draft?

I know you know what a rough draft is but sometimes I think it needs to be clarified. When writing your story for the first time, it is important to know that your first draft is supposed to be messy. It won’t be perfect, nor should it be because you are just starting out on that story. Write your first draft with a focus on getting those words down on the page. Once you do that, then you can go through rounds of editing and revisions to polish up your work.

Rough Draft Examples

Last year I wrote a story that was a crossover fanfiction of the shows Gravity Falls on Disney and Hazbin Hotel by Vivienne Medrano for @genggiyen-ejen. You can find the original post here.

Here is what the first page of my final draft looked like for the crossover piece:

It looks pretty clean, right? But look at how it started out! Here is the first page of my original rough draft:

Look how messy it is!

Here is another page:

I wanted to show you this to help you see how messy first drafts can be. Don’t feel bad if you find yourself deleting and crossing out a bunch of text, that’s normal! This is all a part of the process. Having a bunch of mistakes in your first few drafts is not a bad thing. That does not mean you are a bad writer either. That is the point of early drafts because as you continue working on your piece, you will be purposefully taking a look at and seeing how you can improve your work—that perspective is the important part!

Writing Tips

Let’s see what kind of changes I made in this early draft to share some tidbits of writing advice. For those who work with me for editing, it might feel nice to see that I sometimes make the same mistakes I tutor you about in my own early drafts but, as I said earlier, the key is to catch them and fix up your story as you start to edit.

Let’s look at this section:

First, you’ll see I made a punctuation mistake. When ending a line of dialogue, it’s important to get the punctuation correct. In this line, “‘Dudes! It went awesome! Look here.” Soos reaches into…¬,” I missed putting a period instead of a comma. When there are no dialogue tags attached to a complete line of dialogue, you always end it with a period. Now, if it was attached to a dialogue tag such as “‘Look here,” Soos says.” then that would end with a comma!

You will see that I cross out the line “He carefully unfolds it and presents it.” When Soos talks about the number on the paper he has and tells everyone what it is, that lets the reader know that Soos is presenting it without saying it directly. It’s better to show us what is happening than to outright tell it. That’s why I crossed that line out.

Here is another example:

In this section, I have a jampacked line where the character Mabel runs, but in the first draft, I accidentally explained it twice. “Mabel is rushing as fast as her legs can carry her. She darts around the trees and leaps…” Here we have Mabel “rushing as fast as her legs can carry her” and she “darts” around. Both explain how she is running. To create a clear and concise statement (and also try to fit into a specific word count requirement!) it’s best to pick only one description. I crossed out the long description and instead wrote, “Mabel darts.”

Another example of picking the most concise wording can be seen right at the end of the paragraph as well. I wrote about the pet pig, Waddles running away. I picked the description, “excited squeals and pounding feet.” I decided to cut it down to just, “excited squeals,” because one description is more effective and impactful than listing a bunch of actions and descriptors. I picked “squeals” VS “pounding feet” because I am writing about a pig! Which detail seems to be more specific to a pig? “Squeals!” The sound of running or “pounding feet” can be given to almost anything, which makes it a less specific detail.

Conclusion

Working on a first draft can be quite an adventure! My best advice is to work on writing out all your ideas and focusing on just getting those words down on the page. As you start to edit, you can work on cleaning up your punctuation, word choices, story ideas, plot, and more. I hope seeing some examples like these can help you feel better about your own process. Happy writing!

All my best,

Danni Lynn