Chapter Eleven

The Second-Draft Deep Dive

“My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.”
—Chuck Palahniuk

Don’t panic, you don’t have to shave your head to celebrate the commencement of your second draft. But there is a certain poignancy in Chuck Palahniuk’s willingness to do so. The best-selling author of Fight Club makes a good point about preparing yourself for the deep dive of the second draft. Short of cutting off all your hair, here are some strategies you might want to consider when preparing for your own second draft.

1. Put the manuscript aside for a while. One week is good; one month is better. The more distance you put between the first draft and the second, the more clear-eyed you’ll be when it’s time to get started. Try not to think about the story during this time; jot down notes when you must, but consider going on vacation or indulging in other interests or getting back in the social swing of things or doing any activity you may have neglected while focused on pounding out that first draft.
2. Find some beta readers. Many writers swear by this process. It might work well for you, too, depending on who your beta readers are, the kind of feedback they give you, and how well you handle and process criticism. If you have an agent, he may be your first-draft reader. Or maybe it’s your wife or your writing group or an editor you commission to read and comment on your work. If you have a contract, you may be tempted to send your first draft directly to your acquisitions editor, that is, the editor who bought your book. Resist that impulse. As a general rule, take the feedback you get from amateurs with a grain of salt—they don’t know any more than you do. Take the feedback from professionals—agents, editors, and published writers in your genre—seriously. Just remember that while they may be right about the issues you need to address, they can be way off in terms of how to address those issues. If you find that you are simply not ready to show anyone your work yet, or you tend to choke when you get too much feedback too early, then don’t.

Whatever you do, you need to approach this second draft with a seriousness of purpose, just as Palahniuk does. Remember, the people who get published are the writers who (1) finish and (2) revise. The good news is, you’ve finished. Now you can revise. This process is a lot like making dessert. When you’re writing your first draft, you know you’re making dessert, but you won’t know until you finish if you’ve made a pie or a cake. Now that you know it’s a cake, you can go back through and make your dessert more cakelike—through revision.

This second-draft revision is not the same as copyediting or line editing. (More on those later.) Most writers can figure out—or hire out—the copyediting and line editing they need. But such editing would be premature at this point—that’s icing on the cake—so don’t waste your time or money by soliciting those services too soon. Too many writers jump right from first draft to line editing or copyediting—and miss the most important edit of all, the one that can make the difference between success and failure.

What you’re doing now, at the second-draft stage, is a kind of supercharged developmental edit, in which you:

• identify the themes and weave them through the story.
• look at the imagery and symbology of your story.
• milk the drama—that is, figure out what works and doesn’t work in your story in terms of structure, character, and point of view.

This supercharged developmental edit is what can make the difference between getting published and not getting published, and can help you find and keep an audience and/or write that breakout book if you’ve been languishing in the midlist ranks.

I have a client who’s a very good writer, whose mystery novels always placed in the top three of the St. Martin’s Minotaur/Malice Domestic Mystery writing contest, one of the leading competitions in the genre. But she never won and she never revised and she never got a book contract; she just kept on writing novels. Not because she was lazy or inept or resisted revision, but because she had written up to her current level of craft and didn’t know how to get to the next level.

When I found out that she’d done so swell in these contests, I immediately asked to read one of the manuscripts and discovered that she was doing a lot right; she created strong plots and compelling characters and she had an engaging voice. But she’d made some of the mistakes that editors don’t want to take on, and was missing a level of refinement that comes only with a strong second-draft revision. I gave her notes, and she revised, and revised again, and bingo! I got her a multi-book deal—and the first book in her new series will be out later this year.

You can hire a developmental editor to give you this kind of feedback, but before you do, try to do as much of a second-draft deep dive as you can by yourself. Let’s take a look at the elements you should focus on during this revision.

Theme Weaver

“Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don’t have to go looking for it.”
—Richard Russo

As Richard Russo points out, quite rightly, your themes should find you. Now that you’ve written your first draft, you should be able to determine what you’re really writing about. You thought you were writing a love story, but what you’re really writing about is loss—and how love can help people survive life’s inevitable losses. Or you thought you were writing a high-concept, plot-driven thriller, but what you’re really writing about is revenge—and how the need for vengeance can drive even the most ordinary man to extraordinary deeds. Or you thought you were writing a family saga, but what you’re really writing about is the sins of the fathers—and how those sins can revisit every generation.

You may have to look no further than your own experiences and obsessions. Most of us writers write about what scares us, consumes us, amuses us, comforts us, and/or bedevils us. As Stephen King likes to tell people who ask him why he writes what he writes: “What makes you think I have a choice?”

Charles Dickens was driven by his passion for the underdog, and his stories—Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, and so forth—dramatize the economic, social, and moral injustices of Victorian life. This passion sprang from his childhood, during which his father was sent to debtor’s prison and Dickens was forced at the tender age of twelve to work in a shoe-blacking factory. Leon Uris dedicated much of his oeuvre—Exodus, QB, Mila 18, QB VII—to fighting anti-Semitism after the Holocaust. Uris was a Jewish American who served as a U.S. Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. Maya Angelou drew upon her own life to explore the themes of feminism, racism, child abuse, identity, and family in her acclaimed autobiographical works of poetry, essays, plays, songs, and memoirs, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Anne Rice wrote the groundbreaking Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died from leukemia, a blood disease. As we’ve seen, Janwillem Van de Wetering drew the themes for his police procedurals from his time as a cop and his Buddhist practice.

If you’re thinking that your life has been way too ordinary to serve as the seeding ground for such mighty themes, think again. Claire Cook, best-selling author of such novels as Must Love Dogs, sees her major theme as reinvention. Her novels have all been about people who must reinvent themselves to survive—and thrive. Cook reinvented herself as an acclaimed novelist at midlife and now has become a reinvention guru of sorts, speaking at conferences and running workshops on the subject. Her recent book, Never Too Late, is not a novel but rather a self-help treatise on reinvention (and has some great tips about making a name for yourself as a writer).

Ultimately, private preoccupations fuel our work and provide us with themes, like it or not.

Sit down with your story and identify your themes. If you’ve used beta readers, ask them what they think your story is really about. Explore the emotions that drive your characters. That’s where the juice of theme is. Once you know your theme, ask yourself what metaphor you’re using—or can use—to underscore it.

“My world view is that it can all go to hell in an instant, and you have to be ready for it. That’s pretty much the central theme running through my work. It’s about people’s awareness of how uncertain life can be and their trying to guard against that.”
—David Morrell

Creating an Image System

“For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.”
—Hilary Mantel

Metaphor is the lifeblood of storytelling. Finding the metaphor for your story—and capitalizing on it in your second draft—is a concrete way to take your work to the next level. Find the metaphor, and you can build an image system around it and perhaps add an organizing principle as well. Let’s take a look at the definitions of these terms:

A metaphor is a symbol or image used to represent something else. For a storyteller, stories are metaphors for life.

An image system is the collection of recurring patterns and motifs in a story. The best image systems relate to the theme and metaphor of the story.

An organizing principle is the conceptual framework for a story. Diaries, journals, blogs, units of time, instructions, transcripts—all these and more can be used as organizing principles for a story.

Metaphors, image systems, and organizing principles are the refinements that can mark well-crafted work. Here are some examples:

Many stories are built around the metaphor of a journey—that is, life as a journey. Let’s take a look at two different journey stories.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of self-actualization, a depressed American divorcee goes on a journey in search of the meaning of life—only to find herself. Gilbert needs to learn to nurture herself, and she does so in three acts. In Act One, she learns to feed her body by eating in Italy; in Act Two, she learns to feed her soul by praying in India; and in Act Three, she learns to feed her heart by falling in love in Bali.

Each act has its own image system, as revealed in the prose itself.

• The pasta and libations and linguistic pleasures of Italy:

• The ashram and chanting and meditation of India:

• The gurus and temples and expats of Bali:

Gilbert strings 108 transformative experiences together in a japa mala, the traditional prayer beads of India (on which the rosary is based). The japa mala is her organizing principle.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

In this charming and moving novel, Harold Fry, a bored and boring retired brewery manager from Devon, goes to mail a letter to his ailing friend Queenie and keeps on walking—right past the post office and all the way up the length of England, a total of 647 miles—in the hope of saving her life. The story recalls both John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and is similarly organized, complete with the cast of colorful characters Harold meets along the way.

Joyce tells the story mile by mile, encounter by encounter, and revelation by revelation, as the colorless Harold trudges on toward his dying friend. As he walks, Harold warms to the natural beauty of the English countryside, opens his heart to the people he meets, and remembers how much he loves his wife—and life itself.

The sea—where Harold’s journey begins and ends—plays an important role in the image system of the novel, as does the landscape of England, home, and heart.

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”
—Paulo Coelho

Ray Bradbury credited his success as a writer to his strong sense of metaphor. As you go through your revision, find ways to strengthen the metaphor of your story. Consider the image system that may complement your metaphor; look for the patterns and motifs that appear in your work and expand on them. If you think you may be able to employ an organizing principle, use it as a framework. Your story will be better for it.

Milking the Drama

“I think remarkable storytelling always finds an audience.”
—Jeff Bezos

The purpose of the second-draft deep dive is to find the remarkable storytelling in your first draft—and milk it. In my experience, one of the most common reasons editors pass on a story is a lack of drama. Even a manuscript riddled with other problems may interest a publisher if the potential for drama is present. So now that you have your first draft on paper, you need to ask three questions:

• Who’s telling the story?
• What happens in the story?
• Who makes it happen?

Who’s Telling the Story?

Simply put, who’s telling the story is determined by the chosen point of view. Generally the protagonist should tell the story. Why? Because it’s the protagonist’s story. Readers want to know what the hero is thinking and feeling; they want in on his inner life.

Deprive readers of your heroine’s innermost thoughts and feelings, and you’ll lose those readers. The inner life is the novel’s last best defense against all of the other activities that compete for the reader’s attention—from television, theater, and film to video games, the Internet, and social media. Only fiction (and creative nonfiction) lets readers into the head of the hero, where they can hear his thoughts as he thinks them; other media show us what the hero does and says, but deny access to his inner life (apart from the occasional lame voice-over).

That’s why you need to make sure that most—if not all—of your story is told from your protagonist’s point of view. She is who your readers are supposed to care about, the person they need to fall in love with, the person they’ll follow through three hundred or more pages. While there is room for other points of view, if necessary (and we’ll discuss that in a minute), you should go through your story and make sure that you are writing from your hero’s point of view as much as possible.

Types of Point of View

There are a number of different points of view (POV), including the following:

• First-person POV: I thought about what it would do to my mother, but then I grabbed the gun and fired anyway. The most intimate point of view.
• Second-person POV: You thought about what it might do to your mother, but you grabbed the gun and fired anyway. A weird and self-conscious point of view, as you can see (apart from in how-to books). Use second person very sparingly in fiction and memoirs—if ever.
• Third-person limited POV: He thought about what it would do to his mother, but then he grabbed the gun and fired anyway. This is the preferred POV for many writers—and many genres—thanks to its versatility.
• Omniscient POV: He thought about what it would do to his mother, but then he grabbed the gun and fired anyway. What he didn’t know was that his mother would never know, because she had already gone to Florida. This is the author playing God—a concept considered old-fashioned by many.
• Objective/dramatic POV: He grabbed the gun and fired. The objective point of view is the point of view of the camera, which is the POV of film, television, and the theater. The audience sees what the camera sees (or what’s on the stage). It’s not a common choice for the novelist or memoirist, as it deprives the writer of describing the inner lives of her characters.

As you review your second draft, you may realize you have used more than just your heroine’s POV. If you’re writing a crime novel, you may have scenes from your villain’s point of view and maybe the victim’s point of view as well. Or perhaps you’re writing a love story and have alternated his and her points of view from chapter to chapter. Just remember that whenever you change your POV character, you are asking readers to shift gears, and most of the time they won’t like it. They have a favorite character—your hero—and want to spend most of their time with him. That said, you can use multiple points of view, if you do it elegantly. Several authors do it elegantly: George R.R. Martin, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and Louise Penny, to name but a few.

POV Rules to Live By

Point of view is a tricky—and touchy—subject. First of all, it’s often hard to figure out—and many writers get it wrong. Mistakes in point of view are red flags to editors, who may assume before they read any further that the writer is an amateur—and stop reading altogether. Before you get all indignant on me, let me say that I’ve heard more than one editor complain about this publicly at conferences (and far more say the same thing behind closed doors).

I’ve lost too many sales to POV issues writers have refused to address. In fact, I’ve found that editors are so sensitive to POV problems that now I won’t work with any writers who refuse to fix the POV—even if a writer has a great story with great characters. That said, writers who have mastered their craft have earned the right to break the rules. But you need to learn those rules first.

Here are some rules to keep in mind, rules that you break at your peril, depending upon your level of craft:

• Stick to first-person or third-person limited point of view. As we’ve seen, these are the preferred points of view for contemporary fiction. With good reason.
• If you are using first person, stick to one POV per book. I know, I know, Gillian Flynn used multiple first-person points of view in Gone Girl, but this is the exception to the rule. Gillian Flynn has mastered her craft—and this was not her first successful book. Debut authors can seriously sabotage their chances of selling their work when they use multiple first-person points of view. Editors hate this approach because it’s difficult for the reader to keep track of which “I” is speaking.
• Don’t jump from head to head. Leaping from one character’s head to another willy-nilly drives editors crazy. Just don’t do it.
• Stick to one POV per scene. Period. I know, I know, you see writers break this rule all the time, even in today’s bestsellers, but often those writers are British, European, and/or originally published abroad (as opposed to in the United States) or were published many years ago.
• No more than six POVs per book. Every time you switch points of view, the reader has to shift gears. The fewer POV characters you have, the better, especially if you’re a debut author. A far bigger agent than I tells her big-name clients that she can’t sell anything with more than six POVs—and she refuses to even try. I believe her.
• Don’t use omniscient point of view. You might be thinking, But I see omniscient point of view all the time in science fiction, fantasy, British mysteries, European fiction, nineteenth-century novels. … And you’d be right. But if you want to publish in the United States, then you need to sell American editors—and American editors tend to see omniscient point of view as old-fashioned.

One more rule (I know, I know): The writers you love may break these POV rules all the time. But I’ll say it once more: It takes great craftsmanship to break them—and you do so at your peril. I can tell you lots of POV horror stories, but I’ll settle for two.

The first involves screenwriters turned novelists. I have several screenwriting clients, and when they write their first novels, they often have a problem with point of view. They tend to use the objective/camera point of view instead of third person or first person—and they have to go through and fix the point of view before I can shop their work.

Other clients, in the wake of the megahit Gone Girl, have written stories using multiple first-person points of view. This is tough to pull off, and I usually ask writers to change this. At my request, one of my clients did a second draft in which she switched from multiple first-person POV to multiple third-person limited POV—and I got her a multi-book deal. Another client had also written a story with six first-person points of view. In her second draft, she whittled the number of POVs to three and switched them to third person. I got her a multi-book deal as well.

Who you choose to tell your story is a momentous decision—and one that will absolutely affect your ability to sell your work. So make sure that a point-of-view review is part of your second-draft deep dive.

What Happens in Your Story?

“I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller-coaster ride.”
—Mark Haddon

You know who’s telling your story. Now it’s time to look at what’s happening. Go through your first draft, marking up the text in different-colored markers for the following three basic elements:

1. Conflict. Conflict is the lifeblood of drama. Just as you learned in high school English class, conflict happens whenever your hero is at odds with another person (man vs. man), technology (man vs. machine), society (man vs. society), Mother Nature (man vs. nature), God (man vs. fates/gods), the supernatural (man vs. the paranormal), or even himself (man vs. himself). When your heroine is fighting with her mother or hacking into the CIA database or quitting her job or exposing a political conspiracy or trying to survive a nor’easter or yelling at God or confronting a werewolf or conquering her fear of spiders—this is conflict. Without it, nothing happens. Mark these sections with a green marker.
2. Description. These are the lines, paragraphs, and/or sections in which you describe your setting, expound on theme, detail the backstory, etc. Mark them in pink.
3. Inner Life. These are the parts in which you record your character’s thoughts and feelings and ruminations and navel-gazing. Mark them in yellow—and underline the sections in which your character is alone as well.

I know that you’re tempted to skip this exercise. But don’t. Once you finish marking up your hard copy or highlighting your file, you only have to flip or scroll through it to get a sense of the balance of these elements.

• The perfect balance: all green, with yellow and pink woven through the conflict, creating a tapestry of action
• A good balance: 75 percent green, 15 percent yellow, 10 percent pink, or thereabouts
• A bad balance: less than 50 percent green.

Now that you know how much conflict you have in your first draft, you can amp it up in the second draft. Aim for that perfect balance.

“I cut everything that stands in the way of the narrative thrust; anything that lapses beneath a certain state of tension. Because this seems to me the essence of the novel—the exact harmony between subject matter (symbolisms, intellectual, and stylistic aims) and narrative force (simple old readability). … Narrative is a sort of magnetism.”
—John Fowles

Who Makes It Happen?

“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.”
—David Mamet

Another critical question to ask yourself as you analyze your first draft and take that deep dive into your second draft is this: Does the protagonist drive the action? Think of your story as a movie, one that every A-list actor in Hollywood is hot, hot, hot for. Why? Because it’s such a great role. For an actor, that means he’s the star, he’s the one the movie is all about. From the moment he steps on the stage, he’s got all the best lines, the best scenes, the best dramatic arc. He gets the girl, he takes the castle, he saves the world.

He may have help—friends and associates—but when the bomb is about to go off, he defuses it. Personally.

I can’t tell you how many otherwise perfectly good storytellers fail to make their protagonists drive the action of their stories, from beginning to end. It’s one of the most-common complaints I hear from editors—and one of the most-common plot mistakes I ask authors to fix before I send out their work. Even in crime fiction—where you’d think that common sense alone would dictate that the sleuth, amateur or professional, would solve the case and play a proactive role in the identification and apprehension of the murderer—many writers give away the best scenes to secondary characters.

So in your second draft, make sure that your likable protagonist is driving the action. Make the role one that Hollywood’s A-list will be lining up to play.

You Really, Really Like Me

The other side of this coin is likability. The actors who get the best leading roles are the ones audiences like, the ones they’ll pay good money to see on the screen—the Brad Pitts, George Clooneys, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Lawrences, Reese Witherspoons, and Judy Denches of the world. Even when they play truly flawed characters, audiences like them. So your protagonist needs to be likable. This means creating a character who is worth hanging out with, because he or she is funny or smart or resourceful or just plain nice.

“I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.”
—Robert Boswell

Coming up for Air

Okay, you dove into your second draft and made it the best it can be. Your story rocks with conflict—and your protagonist rocks that conflict. You’re ready to polish, polish, polish—until your story shines so bright that you’ll need to wear shades.