What Writing Over 30 Books Has Taught Me About Surviving the Second Draft

Leave It Alone

When possible, put the manuscript away for a while. A day helps. A week is better. If you’re on a deadline, at least take your hairless dog for a walk (my dog, Hubert van Eyck, is hairless, isn’t yours?).

Giving it a breather is useful because you know what you want to say. You know what you meant by every sentence. But what you meant is not necessarily how readers will understand it. You know your own material too well, so your brain fills gaps without noticing them. You know that the man introduced on page 42 is the protagonist’s brother, even though you forgot to tell the reader until page 89. You know the definition of antidisestablishmentarianism, so it doesn’t occur to you to define it for the reader, or use a less baroque word.

After time away, re-read the whole manuscript. Resist the urge to repair every sentence as you go. Make notes. Mark places where your attention wanders, where a chapter starts too slowly, where a fact appears twice, where an explanation arrives fifty pages after it was needed. The aim of this first read-through is diagnosis. The developmental edit. A surgeon doesn’t begin operating while the patient is still walking through the door. At least, I hope not.

Pay particular attention to your own boredom. If you want to skim a passage you wrote, a reader who paid money for the book will feel even less enthused about reading it. I have a simple rule: anything that makes my eyes glaze over has volunteered itself for removal.

Find the Book’s Main Sentence

Before revising, explain the book in one or two sentences. What is it actually about? What question does it answer? What experience does it promise the reader?

This is easy with some books. My book The Art of Forgery examines why people forge art and why the rest of us are so eager to believe them. Quick, concise, intriguing summaries make books easier to pitch, easier for editor’s to wrap their heads around, easier for readers to understand and say “I want to buy this.” Another of my books, Stealing the Mystic Lamb, is the true story of the world’s most frequently stolen artwork, which is also the most influential painting ever made. One sentence comprised of two clauses, each with a superlative, both potentially intriguing. And you know what you’ll get if you buy the book.

Other books take longer to pin down. That struggle to concisely explain a book tells you something useful. If you can’t describe the book after writing an entire draft, you may have squeezed two or three books into a single manuscript that is trying to do too much and asking too much of the reader to follow it all.

Keep that main sentence beside you during the second draft. Every chapter must earn its place by serving the book’s Big Idea as summed up in that sentence. An anecdote might be lovely but it might not work with this particular book, so stash it for later. Writers often keep extra material because the research took weeks, the interview required a train journey, or the joke remains one of our favorites. The reader knows none of this. The reader sees only whether the material helps with the particular book they are reading at that moment. If it doesn’t benefit the book at hand, save it for elsewhere.

Independent authors need to be especially ruthless here. A traditional editor may send a cheerful email asking why Chapter Seven exists (presuming you found it, as per the example above). When you publish independently, you’ve got to ask the question yourself. You are author, acquisitions editor, and the person at the meeting who has to explain why anyone should buy the thing.

Reverse-Outline What You Actually Wrote

I usually outline before drafting, often with a mind map drawn with pen on paper. Plans help, though manuscripts develop directions of their own once you start writing. By the end of the first draft, your original outline may no longer describe the draft you actually wrote.

Make a new outline from the manuscript itself. This is what I mean by “reverse outlining.’ Summarize every chapter in a short paragraph. Then summarize each of those chapters in one sentence. You’re reducing the chapter to its essence. What does it provide for the story you’re telling, and for the reader’s experience of it? This exposes structural trouble with remarkable speed.

Maybe Chapters Three and Eight make the same point? Perhaps Chapter Five supplies information required in Chapter Two? Do four consecutive chapters offer background before the story starts moving again? Does the strongest chapter sit near the end because you assumed the reader needed 200 pages of preparation? They probably need far less. You should front-load your manuscript with interesting narrative hooks on page one, because today’s readers have so much media competing for their attention that they don’t have the patience for a slow build.

Lay the chapter summaries out on one page or a table. I like paper because I can draw arrows, cross things out, and enjoy the primitive pleasure of moving boxes around. Give every chapter a purpose. Write that purpose beside it. “Interesting story about a Venetian collector” does not qualify. “Shows how collectors create demand for disputed objects” does. My mind maps look like constellations. I’ve got the summaries of chapters, scenes, or characters. When one is fully developed (for now) I draw a box around it. Then I use colored pencils to make arrows connecting the scenes with the chapter I imagine them going in, and put them in a narrative order.

If a chapter can’t support the book’s main sentence, cut it or save it for another project. I keep a file for excised material. Calling it “Deleted” feels brutal, so I sometimes call it “Save for Later.” This allows me to remove a beloved passage while pretending it may enjoy a productive future elsewhere.

Gather Repetition in One Place

First drafts often circle. I do this all the time. I’ll repeat the idea I want to convey several times in slightly different ways, when my reader only needs it laid out once. During revision, search for every appearance of a major subject and bring the material together.

This is one of the fastest ways to improve a manuscript. Put every passage on the same subject together. You may discover that you have made the same point four times. Once assembled, they reveal that you have said the same thing four times. Nobody wants to read a complex book (aside from a few philosophers). Clearer, more straightforward, less wordy: these are all preferable approaches.

Choose the best version. That’s almost always the simplest version you can write. Add anything useful from the others. Delete the echoes. Readers enjoy reminders when a long book requires them; they dislike being treated as though their memory resets at every chapter break.

Watch for repeated favorite words, too. I like writing “perhaps” and I caught myself using it four times a few paragraphs earlier in this essay, so I went back and changed it. Search the document and see what you have overfed. 

Front-Load the Interest

The opening of the book deserves disproportionate attention. So does the opening of every chapter. Readers decide repeatedly whether to continue, and chapter breaks offer convenient exits.

Begin with action, a vivid image, a surprising fact, or a question the chapter will answer. Spare the reader a throat-clearing paragraph about what you plan to discuss. Discuss it. “In this chapter, I will examine the history of art insurance” can usually disappear. Open with the collector who woke to find an empty rectangle on the wall and an insurance assessor at his door. Mortal danger, chases, puzzles, intriguing questions, surreal images are all great for openers, because you need to grab your reader by the proverbial throat and get their attention and interest right away. Otherwise they’ll switch on Netflix, grab the next novel, hop on Instagram, or all of the above in lieu of continuing to read your book.

The end of a chapter should create forward pull. This need not involve a literal cliff, a dangling hero, or a revolver found in Aunt Gertrude’s handbag. At every chapter break, the reader can put the book down. End with an unanswered question, a new complication, or a detail that carries them into the next chapter. Give the reader a reason to read one more page before bed. 

Be Specific

Specificity is always more interesting and memorable than something generic. Second drafts improve when abstract passages receive people, places, dates, objects, and actions. “Collectors increasingly worried about authenticity” says not very much (I’m already thinking about what’s on Netflix). Who worried? About which object? What did they do? Did someone send a painting to a laboratory, sue an auction house, or wake a retired expert at six in the morning?

We humans are very bad at grasping ideas, and very good at envisioning human protagonists doing things. Theory needs an illustration. Start with the incident and draw the larger point from it. Readers remember the forged painting discovered above a sofa. They’re less likely to remember three pages on the conceptual instability of authorship (my eyes glazed over just writing that sentence).

Specific detail also exposes weak thinking. Vague prose lets an author skate over gaps in knowledge. Once you have to name the city, date the event, and explain who did what, you may discover that more research is required. This is useful, however annoying.

Keep citations and source notes attached to the text as you work. Reconstructing them later is archaeological labor, except the buried civilization is your own filing system. 

Ask Readers Better Questions

Outside readers help, provided you choose them with care and ask useful questions. “Did you like it?” rarely produces much. Friends want to remain friends. They’ll say “yes” and mention a typo on page 14 and then you’ll get a beer. Nice but not helpful.

Ask where they grew bored. Ask where they felt lost. Ask which chapter they remembered a week later. Ask whether any section felt repetitive. Ask them to explain the book’s main argument back to you.

You don’t have to accept every suggestion. Three readers will sometimes offer three incompatible solutions. I had an agent submit my novel to three different editors and each wanted changes that were incompatible with what the other editor wanted. One said “I’d like this novel better if there were clearly a supernatural element. Can you play that up?” Another said, “I don’t like that there’s a hint of the supernatural here. Make it more realistic.” What was I supposed to do? In the end, if various readers disagree as to what could improve the book, you have to go with your instinct.

Independent authors should budget for a professional editor whenever possible. A good editor will tell you when the opening drags, the chronology wobbles, or your favorite chapter belongs in the spare-parts file. 

Make the Work Small Enough to Finish

“Revise the book” is a terrible item for a to-do list. It’ll sit there for months, radiating guilt.

Instead break down your workload into pieces that feel doable in a reasonable amount of time, like one day’s work. I use chapters, scenes, or work packages of around 1,500 words. I place two boxes beside each section on my map: one for the first draft and one for the second. Checking them off is absurdly satisfying. A book may contain 80,000 words, but if you’ve broken it down into chunks, that’s just (pulls out calculator) 53.33 days of work. So make your book work checklist into 54 boxes to check off. See the progress as you check off those boxes. So satisfying.

I work well in two-hour blocks. After that, my concentration wanders toward email, peanuts, my hairless dog, or watching Brooklyn 99 reruns with my daughters. Your useful block may last forty minutes or four hours. Choose a period during which you can remain sharp, then stop. Once my concentration goes, I stop. When I’m tired, I grow too reluctant to cut anything. 

Accept That a Second Draft Is Still a Draft

My second drafts are better than my first drafts. But they’re still very much unfinished. Once the structure holds, I move to sentence-level editing, factchecking, consistency, rhythm, proofreading, and the hundred small decisions that prepare a manuscript for readers.

Expecting many, many drafts makes the process easier. The second draft doesn’t have to carry the full burden of perfection. No draft does. You can do as many as needed. The job of the second draft is to make the book sound, coherent, and worth polishing.

After more than thirty books, I’ve grown to like revision because it always gives you a fresh chance. You can play as much as you want. It certainly can feel tedious at times. To counter this and embrace the play and building side of the task at hand, I work on one chapter or scene at a time, solve the problems in front of me, and keep going until the manuscript holds together.

Then I open Chapter One again. The Art Thief took seventy-eight drafts. I stopped when the publisher sent it to typesetting.

Noah Charney is a bestselling author of more than thirty books and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His books include The 12-Hour Author. He is also Professor of Writing for Reedsy.