The Second Draft Is the Real One

There is a particular species of despair that arrives around page ninety of a first draft, when you realise that the book you are writing bears no relation to the book you intended, and that the gap between them is not a failure of effort but a failure of the original idea.

I have felt this five times now. It is, I have come to believe, the only reliable sign that things are going well.

What the first draft is for

The first draft is not a rough version of the book. It is a different document entirely, and it has one job: to find out what the book is about. Not the plot — the plot you can usually guess in advance. What it is about. The thing underneath, the pressure that makes the sentences necessary.

With The Salt Archive I spent eleven months convinced I was writing about coastal erosion. I had the research. I had a folder of survey reports and a very good chapter about tidal measurement that is not in the finished book. What I was actually writing about was a woman who cannot forgive a village for being kind to her.

I could not have known that in advance. There is no outline that produces it. You only find it by writing eighty thousand words of the wrong thing and noticing which paragraphs are alive.

The reading pass

So: finish the wrong book. Print it. Read it in one sitting if you can, with a pencil, and mark only the passages where the prose stops performing and starts telling the truth. There will be fewer than you hope. In my experience it is between four and nine per cent of the text.

Those passages are the book. Everything else is scaffolding you built to reach them, and scaffolding comes down.

The second draft is where you rebuild the whole structure around those nine per cent. It is slower, harder, and infinitely more pleasant, because for the first time you are writing towards something rather than feeling for it in the dark. This is the draft where I start enjoying myself. This is the draft that gets published.

The first draft is not wasted. It is the cost of admission. But I would encourage anyone stuck at page ninety to stop grieving the book they thought they were writing, and go and find out what they have actually got.