From Rough Draft to Polished Manuscript
Getting from Rough First Draft to Polished Manuscript with Draft Dating and ‘Kindlediting’
By Julie Tollefson
What writer doesn’t love to get a peek at another writer’s process? This month, Andrew Welsh-Huggins shares five tips for using his “semi-unorthodox editing technique” to take your manuscript from rough to ready.
1) Give your manuscript a working title and date — For Andrew, every new project begins with a fresh Word document, a working title, and a date: Oct. 14, 2022-The Mailman-Four (“Four” indicates this project is Andrew’s fourth “Mailman” story).
“Don’t get hung up on a title,” he says. Change the title if something better occurs to you later.
Andrew developed this draft-dating process by trial and error, when he found his previous process — involving a separate document containing cuts — cumbersome and difficult to navigate.
“It arose from my frustration at having a hard time figuring out where I was with a draft and not having anything to go back and reference,” he says, laughing that the way he works now appeals to his “micromanaging personality.” “I feel like I have more control over my process by doing it this way.”
2) Know your weaknesses — At the outset, Andrew creates a second document to keep track of thoughts and notes related to the manuscript he’s drafting.
“I find that’s really useful for writing down stuff that you think of as you’re writing but don’t want to go back and fix at the time,” he says.
The notes document is where Andrew tracks the timeline of a novel or story, character names, and plot problems still to be worked out. Andrew also keeps a running list of overused words: simply, apparently, really, actually, several, shrugged, moment. The list goes on, based on what he’s learned about his writing in the past, and he adds to it when he finds more repetitive words and phrases creeping into his work.
“I paste that right at the top. It helps with self-editing while I draft,” he says. “One that drives me crazy, because I do it all the time, is I’m always writing ‘and then Joe started to walk across the room’ instead of ‘and then Joe walked across the room.’ The list does help me remember not to do that.”
Once the structure — draft dating and notes document — is in place, Andrew dives in to his “rocket” draft.
“I always try to write copy that will keep the first time around, but for me, it’s just as important to complete a draft regardless of how bad it is just to have something to shape. For me, that’s where the real work begins,” he says.
Andrew allows himself a break between drafts. He works on short fiction on Fridays, which leads to a natural break of about a week between short story drafts. He tries to allow novels to lie fallow for at least two weeks before diving back into revisions.
“Regardless of whether it’s a short story or novel, I find it takes at least four drafts before it’s ready to show to people,” Andrew says of his work.
3) Change your perspective — Once Andrew’s satisfied his work is almost ready to share, his next step is a process he calls “Kindlediting,” which replicates the experience of reading an e-book and often helps him identify additional changes before he sends his manuscript out into the world.
The first step in Kindlediting is to save a new draft of the manuscript with a new date. Andrew then opens this document using the Kindle app on his phone (though the process would work equally well on a tablet using either the Kindle app or another means of mimicking the experience of reading an e-book).
With the Kindle app open and the manuscript up on his computer screen, he reads through the story on his phone. When he identifies a problem — a typo, an awkward phrase — he makes the change in real time on the manuscript up on his computer.
“I used to go to the other room and make notes on the Kindle document,” he says, “but ultimately I’m always trying to save time and I found that was one more step than I wanted to make.”
Andrew likens the process to proofing your book’s galley, a fine tuning. Using it helped solve one of his frustrations: After reading and rereading a manuscript multiple times and correcting every typo and awkward line he came across, he’d inevitably find more when he received galleys back from his editor.
“For me, Kindlediting is a mandatory step because of how many errors I catch, from basic misspellings to off-kilter dialogue to repetitive words and phrases, to plot holes,” he says. “There’s something about that experience of holding your work in your hand like you’re reading a book versus staring at a screen. It’s convenient because even as it changes your perspective it allows for quick edits.”
Another advantage: It is kind to the environment.
“An alternative obviously would be to print the story out,” Andrew says. “But honestly, it’s kind of expensive and a little bit wasteful.”
The process is not without its downside.
“It is still a screen, which I think we can all agree we’re all over-screened,” he says. And he doesn’t recommend Kindlediting early on. “Especially if you’re on a second or third draft and you realize, wow, this draft needs a ton of work.”
4) Celebrate your progress — One advantage of dating and saving each draft of your document is that you can easily see how far you’ve come with an individual manuscript.
“It’s a more efficient and transparent way of tracing progress on a story or book,” Andrew says. “Seeing all those dated drafts lined up in my computer window, it gives me confidence that I’ve accomplished something. I find it comforting to see, wow, ‘I’ve completed seven drafts,’ as opposed to ‘I’ve been working on the same draft forever and I’ve lost track of whether I’ve actually made any progress.’”
For his new novel, The End of the Road, coming in April, Andrew’s files contain 15 drafts dating to August 11, 2015. For Sick to Death, the eighth book in his Andy Hayes private eye novels, he’s completed six drafts, beginning with “Aug. 27, 2019-Andy Hayes Eight” and ending (so far) with “Sept. 15, 2022-Sick to Death.” Other titles along the way: Dead Run and Run for Your Life. Though Andrew changes the title of his work in progress when a better one presents itself, he doesn’t retroactively change the titles of his draft files. A peek at the contents of his drafts folder gives him an at-a-glance overview of the evolution of his work.
The dating technique also makes for a tidy way of finding and restoring a passage you may have cut during previous edits.
But don’t become so focused on lining up multiple drafts that you neglect the opportunity to craft beautiful prose.
“The key is always to draft in the moment and come up with the best possible draft,” he says.
5) Repeat — When Andrew receives feedback from Beta readers or a rejection from a publisher, if a novel or short story is in need of light revision, he’ll repeat the Kindlediting process to incorporate comments. For more significant changes, he’ll work on those first before completing another Kindledit.
“When I’m doing the date-drafting edits on my computer, I’m always trying to focus on the big three — plot, setting, and characters — and making sure it’s a balanced package, as well as making sure I’m writing something interesting and playing fair with the reader,” he said. “With Kindlediting, it’s looking for things that are going to trip the reader up and annoy the reader. It’s dialog that doesn’t sound right. Sometimes it’s as simple as taking out ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’ because they aren’t needed.”
Together, the two parts of the process result in a cleaner manuscript and a transparent history of your progress from idea to finished book or story.