Stephen King recommends a six-week gap between writing your first draft and beginning to edit said draft in his memoir, On Writing.
He says he “puts his draft in a drawer” and doesn’t look at it, barely even thinks about it, for six weeks. I find this adorable. He really does put it in a drawer I think. Or, at least he used to when his drafts lived on paper. I wonder if he still prints his mammoth-sized drafts out and puts them in an actual drawer or not. Can you imagine The Stand printed on letter paper and stuffed in a drawer? Adorable.
In The Big Edit course I’m taking, which guides me through the editing process of my draft, it recommends at least a four-week gap between drafting and editing.
So there must be something to this gap, eh?
I’ve heard some writers struggle with taking time away from this draft they’ve just created. Whether they feel they’re on a timeline or they just can’t stay away from their characters for that long, I’m not sure.
I, for one, completed my first draft and was excited to take a few weeks away from it. It felt done. The drafting phase, anyway. And I had other things to do. A four-week break? Yes, please!
Not wanting those four weeks to eek into four months, though, I booked a 3-day editing retreat for myself a couple hours away from home and looked forward to sinking into Edit Mode once the time came.
In the meantime, I expected to “luxuriate” in other tasks like running my business and taking care of my family. It’s not that drafting felt difficult—it didn’t. That phase just felt over for me. I was ready to move on.
But then I got into the gap.
The first week of the gap between drafting and editing I felt just a little itchy. I kept waking up early to write and remembering I didn’t actually have to get up an hour early anymore because there was nothing else to write.
The second and third weeks of the gap got real dicey. I kept finding myself having not thought about my draft or the story or my characters for hours, even a whole day, at a time. This shook me. I had poured a lot into this draft for ninety days and thought about it constantly when I wasn’t physically writing. Now, all of a sudden, after just a week or two away from it, I wasn’t thinking about it at all?
What did that mean about the story itself? And those characters I’d crafted. Did they not mean that much after all? If I could just forget about them so easily?
In truth, I hadn’t really forgotten them, but they weren’t taking up so much of my conscious thought anymore. Was I falling out of love with them?
Then the fourth week hit. My editing retreat was coming up the following week and Big Fat Doubts started dropping into my mind throughout the day. Was this draft even any good? Would I start editing it and find out that it was actually terrible? Was it so bad it couldn’t even be fixed? Was it so bad that all it’d ever be was this draft, forever stuck in draft mode, never to be anything more? Would I be that way too? This one-hit-draft-wonder. One draft—not even a book, let alone a hit—and that would be the end of my author journey.
Yikes.
Then my entire family, myself include, got sick.
You know what kind of sickness. It’s early 2022. You know exactly what we all came down with.
Thankfully, it was all very mild. But, as I’m sure you also know, it upends every single plan you had for the next two to three, maybe even four, weeks.
Editing retreat, cancelled.
This was when the Big Fat Doubts came in like kamakaze moths, diving and swooping at my head. I was sure I would be decapitated at any moment by these things.
I couldn’t continue on like this if I wanted any shot at actually starting the editing process. No, it wouldn’t start at a nice editing retreat in the mountains, on a lake, but it had to start at some point. I wasn’t letting this dream of becoming an author die so soon. I just wasn’t. Big Fat Doubts, be damned.
I set about inspecting my unhelpful thoughts—limiting beliefs, if you will—around editing my draft.
I realized a few key things that helped me move forward.
I was scared to have an edited draft because an edited draft is ready to be seen by other people. And possibly rejected.
It was suggested in my editing course to write a Hook and Synopsis for the book before starting the first edit. I had already tried to write a one-sentence hook and ended up super frustrated by the process. How was I supposed to write a 500-word synopsis? The whole thing just felt impossible.
But then…
But then, I reflected on how far I’d already come. Instead of worrying about what lie ahead of me, I considered what I’d already been able to accomplish. I’d drafted a 60K-word novel in 90 days and while it might be total shit, it existed. I’ve heard countless people say drafting is the hardest part. If you can draft something on a blank page, you can get through the rest. Now, I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I know I’ve heard it a bunch of times, and thought, hey, I guess that could be true for me.
I also went back to how I was feeling before starting my first draft. I had similar limiting beliefs then. What if I sit down to write and it’s all crap and I can’t actually do this?
Back then, I got over that hurdle by finally saying, Hey, I can’t know if I’m any good at this until I try. And then I started and realized, Wow, this isn’t really that bad. I think I might be okay at this and even if I’m not, it’s quite fun.
The same is now true for this editing process.
I’d never written a Hook or a Synopsis before. I didn’t know if I could do it until I tried. (Spoiler alert: I tried and I eventually figured it out. Huzzah!)
I’ve never edited a first draft before. I don’t know what I’m going to find in that thing. But I won’t know until I start.
So now, I’m going to start.
Monday begins the Editing Phase.
I have my hook and synopsis drafted and I’m feeling pretty damn good about them (finally).
Now I get to sit down each day and edit a few words. I’m aiming for 500 words to begin with and we’ll see if I can bump that to 1,000 a day soon enough.
My goal is to have the entire 60K-word draft edited by May 21, 2022.
Here we go!
