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The first draft is where we capture the heart, the guts, the essence, and the power of our story.\u00a0 But first drafts (at least MY first drafts) are awkward, self-absorbed, disjointed and repetitious (not to mention riddled with grammatical errors.)\u00a0 Revision is needed — yet caution is also needed so that the best parts, the soul of what you intend to say, doesn’t get thrown out with the bath water.<\/p>\n
I typically revise my manuscripts many, many times.\u00a0 Maybe others can get it right in fewer tries, but for me it takes multiple revisions.\u00a0 For me, the second draft is crucial — just as important as the uninhibited brain storm that is the first draft.\u00a0 The second revision feels like I’m standing at a fork in the road.\u00a0 I have a beating heart, a living idea, but it could take on many guises; I could go in many directions with this hot, pulsating mass of words.\u00a0 After the second draft, I’m pretty well set on my path.\u00a0 The more I revise, the harder it is to make drastic changes.\u00a0 And sometimes that’s what is needed most — a complete make-over.\u00a0 My advice is to keep your first draft because if you need to start over you’ll still have that wild, imperfect, passionate heart to drive your story.<\/p>\n
If you have the luxury of TIME, it’s best to give a few days or weeks of rest between drafts.\u00a0 This allows your subconscious mind the opportunity to look at the story from a wider perspective.\u00a0 Resist the urge to cut anything on the second draft.\u00a0 Instead, add to it.\u00a0 Flesh out your idea. Play with multiple viewpoints, if you’re writing fiction, or multiple audiences, if you’re writing nonfiction.\u00a0 Take your time.<\/p>\n
I’m a great believer in printing out first and second drafts.\u00a0 It might seem like a waste of paper, but believe me, those trees will not have died in vain.\u00a0 With a hard copy in hand you can cross out and highlight, you can write notes in the margins, you can give dimension and expression to your rewrite that you can’t do on the keyboard.\u00a0 I have a feeling most young writers are rushing through their work, eager to see it published.\u00a0 Most of our manuscripts benefit from a slower pace and careful revisions.\u00a0 In fact, the revision process never really ends; at some point a deadline approaches and you declare it finished.\u00a0 I’m sure most of us could continually revise one story our entire lives and when we died it would be an entirely different story from the one we started with.<\/p>\n
On the eve of my keynote speech to the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) Marketing Excellence Awards Banquet in Denver, Colorado, I am looking at a talk quite different from the first draft I shared in an earlier post.\u00a0 Yet the heart and the soul of it remains.\u00a0 In telling\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>story I aim to inspire others to find the edge, to take risks, and to share their story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first draft is where we capture the heart, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[306,299,7],"class_list":["post-2282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-revision","tag-smps-colorado-mea-awards-2015","tag-writing-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2288,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282\/revisions\/2288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"96667b1992a1347dbb3ab128e857b593\"](\"http:\/\/www.lindacollison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/96667b1992a1347dbb3ab128e857b593.jpg\")
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