I’ve recently embraced a way of describing the three phases of manuscript development that came to me via a colleague and seems to resonate with writers at different stages of the journey.
Writer’s drafts
In your first drafts you are finding the story, working out who the characters are, and getting to know the fictional world they inhabit. You can think of these early drafts as writer’s drafts. You may get ideas as you go along and plonk them in when they occur to you. You may have a flash of inspiration about the setting half way through, or a plot twist that has the potential for great dramatic tension that will need to be embedded in later drafts.
For example, I read a manuscript recently where a new character was introduced near the end as someone who had had been bullying the main character for the months covered in the plotline from the beginning. There hadn’t been any mention of that character, or the bullying until that point. That’s okay – it was a first draft and the writer was still working out the basic story and who was in it.
Just getting to the end of the first draft is an achievement in itself, but it’s not the end of the process, or necessarily the end of this phase of development. You may write two or more drafts in this phase, depending on your creative process.
Characters’ drafts
After the writer’s drafts you move into the next phase, the characters’ drafts. In these drafts you deepen your understanding of the characters’ actions, goals, motivations, backstory, and relationships. You dig deeper into who your characters are and pay more attention to tracking their emotional journey. You finesse the dialogue to capture your characters’ voices and you consider what the events and actions of the plot mean to the characters. You are telling your characters the story and in these drafts are likely to also hone the plot line perhaps coming up with new plot points and scenes that better show the characters and their actions to the reader.
For example, in his characters’ drafts, the writer of the manuscript mentioned above would need to take time to get to know who the bully was and why he was behaving in that manner. He would need to embed the thread of bullying in the story from early chapters and explore what happened in those bullying events and the consequences, particularly for the main character.
Sometimes, writers feel like they are ‘done’ when they get to the end of this phase of manuscript development. And sometimes writers are aware that they aren’t done yet, but are not sure why; they may have a sense that the story is not yet delivering their intent, but don’t know what to do next. It’s easy to get stuck at the end of the characters’ drafts phase as you’ve done so many revisions to get to this point. However, to get a manuscript up to publication standard, more work lies ahead.
Reader’s drafts
The final phase of manuscript development is the reader’s drafts. This is where you consider the way in which a reader will travel through the terrain of the story. You will step back, shift perspective, consider the big picture, hone your purpose and tweak your story design. You may do detailed chapter and scene outlines to find what you have on the page, rather than what you thought you had, and adjust the manuscript to address recognised issues. This is particularly challenging for self-proclaimed pantsers, but is an invaluable tool to help you make the most progress in your next draft.
In the reader’s drafts you pay closer attention to how you, the writer, are manipulating what the reader thinks and feels along the way, how you reveal and conceal information at different times, for dramatic effect. You may amplify your theme, modifying plot lines. You may tweak point of view, adjust your descriptions, ensure time is well-tracked. You may pull out some of the backstory about characters you put in during the characters’ drafts as you come to recognise what the reader needs to know at that point of the story, and what they don’t need to know. You may cut scenes that no longer feel necessary. And you will fine-tune the prose at a sentence level. It’s a process, and often the most challenging one as you shift perspective to see your story from the outside, not just the inside.
Which phase are you in?
The idea of several drafts in each phase can feel overwhelming, particularly if you have spent years completing your first draft. Think of it the way Lily King’s protagonist does in the book Writers and Lovers. She’s in the process of writing the first draft of her first novel:
Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer… It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected. I need to trust…
Trust the process and consider the phase rather than the number of drafts yet to go. One writer I worked with recently came to me at a loss as to how to find a way forward with her work. Her writing was very strong, but she couldn’t get her head around why it didn’t feel done yet. Once she recognised that she was in the characters’ drafts phase, a big grin spread across her face. Now she got it. Now she understood what she needed to do next, and now she could stop giving herself a hard time for not feeling like she could nail this thing.
Embracing the concept of the three phases of development – from writer’s drafts to characters’ drafts to reader’s drafts – helps you understand what you have achieved so far, where you are up to now, and what lies ahead.
