Finished my first draft ever = anxiety

You don't need to feel either terrible or worried. In fact right now you should be feeling very good about yourself.

• You finished your novel draft. That alone puts you in an elite group. Many people talk about writing a novel and never write a word. Many people start a novel draft and quit when they realise it's actually hard work. You followed through and finished. Finishing is key.
• You've got enough objectivity to see that your draft is not perfect. Plenty of people don't have that. They think their every word is golden and the whole thing is a work of immortal genius any publisher will be honoured to accept. They are wrong.

Yes, your draft needs work. All of them do to some degree, whether it's a wholesale rewrite or a light line edit. So that's the next step - editing.

I'd say that right now leave the draft to lie for a while, a month maybe. You've done a read of the whole thing and know there are some problems. Let your unconscious work on them for a while. Meanwhile go and read up about editing. Editing is a skill like any other. It doesn't just come naturally. You will have to learn how to do it.

Read books, or posts and articles on the Internet. There are plenty out there, as we writers just adore giving advice. You'll find plenty of contradictory advice and different methods of editing. That's okay. Sift through them to find the one that clicks best with you. That gives you a place to start when you come back to your draft in a month, or however long you take off.

Don't worry too much about editing. Yes, it's hard work and you've got to learn it. But that's the case for anything worth doing. And if you're smart enough to write a whole novel draft I'll bet you're smart enough to learn to edit that draft.

It's a first draft. It's GOING to be missing "something" or need work. That's why it's a first draft I'm going to be in the same boat in a few weeks when I finish mine up, but I already know this and accept it as part of the writing process. And it's OK.

As the above poster suggested, set it aside for a while and let your mind clear. Then go back and re-read it. Try to be as unbiased as possible (we are our own worst critics, after all). If you have someone you can really trust, ask them to "alpha read" for you. My husband has been doing this for me and his input has been absolutely the best thing to help keep me encouraged and point out some obvious problems even early in the process.

As was already mentioned, read something. I plan on doing this once I'm done with my rough draft to see how other authors handle structure, dialog, etc etc. I've read a lot before, of course, but this time I'll be reading to really dissect the book rather than for pleasure. Could be something to try.

Those are my suggestions.

First of all, congratulations on finishing a draft!

Like Becky Black said, many people don't even make it this far, so you should feel very proud. A lot of excellent advice has already been given, but I'll echo the suggestion that you put the draft away and take some time to read, both craft books and fiction. You've just given birth to 70k word brain baby. It's time to refill the well.

That said, I can totally relate to that "coming down" feeling after finishing. You've spent two months and a lot of energy on this project, and now it's out on the screen/in your hands and there's an empty space and a mountain to climb in order to get it where it needs to be. Don't worry, this is normal. Take some time, engage with other people's art, let your mind wander and jot down anything that might be relevant when it's time to get back to work. Now might even be a good time to start one of those other projects you've had on the back burner. The important thing is that you take the time to distance yourself from the manuscript so that when you return, you'll be looking at it with fresh eyes.

Best of luck!

Great advice so far--I'll just add that one valuable way to hone your critical eye is to spend time in the Share Your Work forum. It's easier to critique other people's work because you're not attached to it, and it builds skills you can then turn back on your own writing.

Also check out the "First Three Lines" and "First 200 Words" threads, where you'll learn a lot about hooking your readers with a strong opening.

And congratulations!

Congratulations! You've passed the biggest test!

/sarcasmon Now comes the fun part /sarcasmoff

The editing is the part I hate. I have to put it away and do something else - write a short story, or read another book. Then I come back and read the first draft fresh, aloud if I can, and cut/slash/reorganize. Then do it again, looking for the grammatic/spelling/POV issues. Edit, edit. Edit some more. I've gone through 4-5 passes before I then pass it to beta readers. Then I go through again with their advice in mind. THEN, I might consider sending it off to the publisher.

And learning to edit, as Becky Black said, is a skill to learn. I am just beginning to learn. It's very scary to me! I have certain words I love that I have to cut and slash. I found a program that helps me find the sticky spots - smart-edit.com. It highlights words I use too often, weak sentence openings, N-dashes vs. M-dashes, and other bad habits I have

Seriously, First Draft = stream of consciousness. I get past writers block and obsessing about scenes by reminding myself that the First Draft is the First Draft.

Two or three rounds of editing in, other scenes will occur to you that will fill things out.

Makube said:

So yesterday I read the whole thing from beginning to end. It felt short and I felt like there was something missing. Maybe more descriptions, maybe more dialogue etc. Some parts I loved, some parts I disliked.

I feel terrible and worried about how to proceed... Any tips? How was your first drafts ever?

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A lot of good advice already in this thread, so I'll just comment a little on this.

You sound like you're in pretty much the exact right mindset, doubts aside, to polish your work up into solid shape. So many people finish a first draft and are convinced it's Mary Poppins-like in its perfection. Others reread and fall into the "Everything sucks" trap. But this? This sounds healthy. Some good, some bad.

I can't speak to my own first first draft. That was... oh gods, decades ago, I couldn't even tell you what it *was.* but I guarantee it had massive problems. I finished two last year, and both had problems. First drafts are like that unless you have a really solid edit-as-you-go system, and even that takes plenty of correcting not-great writing to hone.

I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I do. I give it some space - at least a week or two, usually more if I wrote the whole thing really fast for me. I try to clear up the big problems and easy grammar issues on a first-pass edit, then spend more time going scene-by-scene in subsequent ones.

Jane Smiley says all rough drafts are perfect by virtue of being finished. So go you! This is a perfect rough draft.

I always feel separation anxiety after I finish a draft. These characters and their problems have lived in my head for months and feel more real than a lot of people around me. So it's normal to feel loss as well as pride.

As others have said, let it sit. A month is good if you can manage it, which I'm going to be honest and say I never can. Make notes as you get ideas. Let your back brain go to work.

But for now, perfect.

Oh, and my first draft SUCKED. My first beta reader almost crucified me (luckily he was also a long time friend AND writer, so he understood and let me off with a suspended sentence). However, he made some excellent suggestions that helped it a lot. Currently in submission.

Congrats! Seriously, pat yourself on the back. I wrote my first draft ever late last summer. I still beam about it.

Definitely give yourself a month or at least a few weeks away from looking at your MS. Especially since you wrote it so fast. 70k in 2 months is amazing! Do another read through and take notes. After cleaning it up and filling it in, then get some beta readers on board.

I have spent many months editing, doing various sweeps for dialogue, character building, grammar. It's been a long process for me, but I've been told it gets quicker with each novel after the first. I sure hope that's the case.

But for now, enjoy your achievement with the knowledge there is more work ahead.

Give it some time, say a month, and then read it again. Contrary to popular opinion, some first drafts are wonderful, and a great many classics out there were wold as first drafts. A pretty fair number of writers, including some of the best, made a habit of writing wonderful first drafts that were sold as is.

I sold teh true first draft of my first novel, in fact. I didn't have time to change a word because I had a deadline of just about one month.

Many first drafts are bad because the writers don't try to make them good. They believe teh myth that all first drafts are crap. Other writers work hard to make their first drat as good a sit can possibly be. If you did this, your first draft may be a heck of a lot better than you think.

Either way, slow down, and at least take a long, hard look at Holly Lisle's one-pass manuscript revision process. http://hollylisle.com/one-pass-manuscript-revision-from-first-draft-to-last-in-one-cycle/

Jamesaritchie said:

... a great many classics out there were wold as first drafts. A pretty fair number of writers, including some of the best, made a habit of writing wonderful first drafts that were sold as is.

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Really? Do you have a list?

I'm also curious about all these "best" authors who typed up their first drafts and published them without any revisions. I've never heard of such a thing, so I'm excited to learn. Do you have names and titles?

Jamesaritchie said:

Many first drafts are bad because the writers don't try to make them good. They believe teh myth that all first drafts are crap. Other writers work hard to make their first drat as good a sit can possibly be. If you did this, your first draft may be a heck of a lot better than you think.

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This strikes me as simplistic and bordering on disrespectful of other writers' processes. My first drafts are rough not because I'm lazy and/or have bought into some Evil Myth of the Bad First Draft, but because for me, it takes writing a complete draft to figure out what I'm really writing about. I always wind up making a lot of changes to characters, plot points, story arcs, etc. in my second draft, so for me laboring over my rough draft to make it a thing of beauty is a waste of time, since I don't know yet what parts of the story are staying.

Congrats! Finishing your first draft is huge. I remember when I finished my firstdraft ever (I had started several before this was the first I ever finished) I felt empty.

I had devoted all of my free time, and time in which I should have been doing other things like sleeping or working out I devoted to writing. I forced myself to add more to it just to keep it going (which I later took out). Then, stupidly, I assumed that was it. I started working on my query. I know, face palm!

Without absolutewrite I was clueless. So I went back and revised twice and then worked on several queries which proved to be much harder than actually writing the book. I let a beta reader read it and for a good two months I just let it sit. It was actually not hard to do be a use I started working on another piece and THEN I revised it again. Only with "fresh eyes."

Revised it another two times, conversed with my beta, which scenes she really liked, how she felt reading it, confided in her the things I was unsure about. Revising with fresh eyes was crucial for me.


On another novel when I read it I loved the first half, and not so much the second. Something just wasn't right but I couldn't place my finger on it, neither could my beta. I ended up having to scrap and rewrite the second half and it's now probably the best piece I've written so far.

It's okay if the pieces don't fit together perfectly the first time you write.

Mine felt short after my first draft too. I just remembered everything I learned while writing it. Then put it away until I almost forgot about it. Seriously. A week or two did me no good because I thought about it daily. It took a good month to get to the point of not thinking about it like that. This helped a lot once I went back to it. I just read it more clearly and was able to identify parts that I knew needed work. The good and the bad jumped out at me a lot more with a fresh mind.

I didn't start to feel good about my first novel until I rewrote over 100,000 words of it.

Don't sweat it. Everyone's first drafts are shit.

I've heard it said that the first draft is the author telling the story to themselves; the second draft is the author telling the story to the world. Take a week or two to distance yourself from the story, then jump in and start editing. Enjoy yourself - second drafts are my favorite part of the process.

Everyone already gave you great advice. Just wanted to say congratulations.

You've done well and earned the right to celebrate. My advice: go out and celebrate (because so many people talk about writing a novel and only a few, like you, actually pull it off) and stay away from your project for a few weeks. When a few weeks is up and you come back to it, that break can provide the distance needed to see the piece's flaws and fix them. That approach really helps if you're in danger of burnout. I've had times when working on a project day after day, I start to hate every line and see nothing but flaws and think about destroying it so no one will ever read it. In that situation, taking a break really helps. By the time I come back, my temper has cooled and I'm usually able to say, "Y'know it's not that bad. Yeah, it's got flaws, but a lot of good stuff as well, and even the flaws aren't so bad they can't be fixed."

First of all, congratulations on writing your first draft. You've done something that literally thousands of people say they're going to do, but never complete that dream. So you automatically get a high-five on that alone, and therefore you are forbidden to feel badly about your first draft.

However.

However, the fact that you see all these problems is a wonderful thing, because it shows that you understand you are not perfect and that your writing is flawed, just like every other writer's. So where do you feel you've gone wrong? Not enough character development? Dialogue sound kinda cheesy? Well, grab a hi-lighter and a notepad and make some notes, hi-light what you like, scratch out what you don't. Add any notes you need to make:

(Make Billy's transfomation into the villian more subtle; fix the dialogue on pg 79--Brian would never say that to Kelly; too much description) etc

so that you make for a better story. We've never read your story; only you have. The fact that you've found these mistakes is a huge step in the right direction. It'll take some time to fix, but once that second draft is complete, you'll be glad you went through all the hassle. Once you've fixed all you can fix, get some beta readers, polish that baby up, and it's off to an agent hunt with you!

Good luck!

Talisker.

Trust me.

caw

My first draft, sadly, was in dire need of editing because I didn't know any technique. Oh, it read fine and relatives loved it - so did I- it wasn't dreadful, but it wasn't of publishable standard.

Great feeling to finish the first one, isn't it? Congratulations. And good luck on the second, too.

greendragon said:

Congratulations! You've passed the biggest test!

/sarcasmon Now comes the fun part /sarcasmoff

The editing is the part I hate. I have to put it away and do something else - write a short story, or read another book. Then I come back and read the first draft fresh, aloud if I can, and cut/slash/reorganize. Then do it again, looking for the grammatic/spelling/POV issues. Edit, edit. Edit some more. I've gone through 4-5 passes before I then pass it to beta readers. Then I go through again with their advice in mind. THEN, I might consider sending it off to the publisher.

And learning to edit, as Becky Black said, is a skill to learn. I am just beginning to learn. It's very scary to me! I have certain words I love that I have to cut and slash. I found a program that helps me find the sticky spots - smart-edit.com. It highlights words I use too often, weak sentence openings, N-dashes vs. M-dashes, and other bad habits I have

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Thanks for the info on smart edit. I think that will be helpful to me too.

First off, congrats! You finished a story and that's something worth celebrating.

Oh my gravy, I remember when I finished my first draft. That feeling was awesome... then I read that first draft and it was disappointing!

Because I looked back at the crap I left on the pages and wondered if I wasn't cut out for writing novels.

As many people have said here, this is kind of the end of one phase and the beginning of a new phase. In a sense, more real work begins now.

My recommendation: Ask yourself why you feel terrible? It may stem in disappointment like my first draft feelings because I wanted to be perfect the first time around. You probably have a different reason but get to the root of that and recognize how you will overcome that feeling to keep moving forward.

Even Stephen King and JK Rowling went through what you're going through right now. None of them got it perfect on the first draft. They spent a lot of time perfecting the craft.

I'd also recommend checking out many of the resources people have recommended here. I'm a big fan of Larry Brooks at storyfix.com. Not sure if you're open to story structure and checking out how plot points fit into a novel though.

Congrats again, keep writing and G Luck!