You finished your first draft - yay!! But now it’s time for the next and arguably most difficult phase: figuring out how to edit your first draft.
Over the next three weeks, I’m going to share the most common revision & editing mistakes that I see as a fiction developmental editor & book coach, starting with one of the biggest offenders - sitting down and reading your first draft like it’s a published, polished book.
Why is that so dangerous? It puts your focus on the wrong things.
First drafts need you to look at them from 10,000 feet in the air. Reading your first draft cover to cover is like hiking. You’re only going to see the trees when instead you need to be focused on the shape of your forest as a whole.
Learn more about how this problem shows up and why it’s such a killer for beginning writers in this week’s episode of the Better Writer Podcast.
Looking for even more help?
I'm running a masterclass on November 17th, 2026 called "Fix Your First Draft."
You'll learn what first drafts really need, how to manage every stage of your revision & editing process, what to focus on in your first draft, and most importantly, you'll map out your best next step in revision!
Fix Your First Draft is just $17 until November 4th, then it's $27.
Learn more and enroll here: https://oliviahelpswriters.thrivecart.com/fix-your-first-draft/
Happy Writing!
P.S. Still looking for a new November writing challenge? You can check out a list of NaNoWriMo alternatives with links to sign up here. Just FYI, I am not affiliated with or sponsoring any of these challenges and haven't even decided if I'm joining one this year.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
You can listen to this episode in your favorite podcast player here or watch on YouTube here.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Please note, this is a lightly edited transcript and may have errors.
Olivia (00:00)
You cannot see the forest if you're down on the ground walking among the trees. You have to get in your helicopter. Metaphorically speaking, of course, helicopters actually terrify me, but you have to get up into the sky and look at your story from 10,000 feet up, or wherever helicopters fly, I don't know if they're actually that high. Doesn't matter. You have to get up there to actually figure out what is going on in that forest on a macro scale. Your first draft is exactly the same. If you are just reading your first draft cover to cover like it is a publication ready book, you are hiking. You are down on the ground, wandering trails, you're not seeing the entire forest. So we need to take a step back and do something else in order to actually see our story and make sure it is working for readers on a macro grand scale.
Welcome to episode 48 of the Better Writer Podcast. Saying that I cannot believe that we are only two episodes away from hitting 50. I mean, it feels like I just started the show. And thank you to everyone who has been part of the journey. Um, I think I had like three downloads on episode one, and now there are thousands. And that's so exciting. And I'm just so grateful for everyone who has taken time out of their day to watch on YouTube or listen in the car while you're gardening or any other way that you are fitting the show into your life. I just really appreciate everyone out there who is listening right now. So thank you. Thank you for being part of this adventure.
All right. For today, we are kicking off a new series talking about the mistakes that people make when they revise their first drafts. And the reason why I'm focusing on first drafts in particular is because I think that first step in revision trips people up a lot. And for some people, they might treat their first draft just like this is the paper that you wrote in high school, and all you need to do is read it over and correct grammar mistakes. And that's not how novels work. So I think people make a lot of mistakes. They bring a lot of misconceptions into the process of revising their first draft. And ideally, I am going to try to help prevent you from making those mistakes. but if you're in a situation where you've already made some of these mistakes, maybe you had a revision that hasn't gone so well, it's okay. You can go back and redo some of the steps. You can revisit your draft at any time. and maybe your draft is still in a position to be treated like a first draft. That is totally fine. You can move forward with this knowledge today and do better. And that is my goal is to help you.
No matter where you are in the process, even if you're not exactly working on a first draft revision right now, this is something you can take into your next book, or if you're still drafting, this is something you can file away for later and come back to when you need it. All right, let's talk about revising your first draft. first off, you will notice that the title of this episode was
First draft editing mistakes. And I will be honest, I did that to trick you because I know that there are people out there who are typing into Google, how do I edit a first draft? And surprise, surprise, you don't edit a first draft. You should not edit a first draft. Your first draft needs to be revised. And that is mistake number one, is that a lot of people jump straight to editing when they should be. Revising. What's the difference? I'm so glad you asked because there is a difference. Revision is high-level stuff. Editing is the nitty-gritty sentence, grammar, etc. Um, I am going to get into that distinction in more depth in the master class that I am running two weeks from now called Fix Your First Draft. I'm going to talk all about the difference between revision and editing. I'm going to talk about when we revise and when we edit in the process. I'm going to tell you what happens in those stages.
So if you were sitting here thinking, like, my gosh, I never knew that revision and editing were different, I got you covered. Come to the class. If you register by Wednesday, November 4th, it is only $17. If you register after that, it's going to go up to $27, which is still an amazing deal. This class is going to run live on November 17th at 4 p.m. Eastern. But if you're listening to this in the future, I am going to be selling the replay of the event. So no matter when you're hearing this, assuming that the internet is still functional and you know I'm still selling courses, you will be able to buy the recording. So you're not going to miss out. You just won't get to see me live, which is totally fine.
So fix your first draft, November 17th. I would love to see you there. And if you register by tomorrow, November 4th, you will get that class for just $17. So I hope to see you there to figure out everything that your first draft needs. and so you can avoid all of the mistakes that I'm talking about in this episode and that I will continue talking about for the next two episodes over the next couple weeks.
All right, back to today's topic. The biggest mistake that I see people making with their first draft, and that is trying to sit down and read that first draft like it is a published, ready-to-print book. And here's how that mistake usually plays out. You hit the end. You have finished your draft and you are so excited that you are ready to print it out and see what you created. And you do that. You print it out. You maybe you even bind it like I did or you whole punch it and put it in a special binder. This could look like many different things. It could also look like you exporting a PDF to your Kindle.
So many different ways that this could show up. But you sit down with that book red pen in hand, and you are ready to revise to create a masterpiece. And when you do that, one of two things is usually going to happen. The first thing is that you are going to get totally overwhelmed by the problems that you see in your manuscript. Some of those problems might be plot things that you recognize. Most likely, those are going to be surface level issues. You might despair, shut that binder and never look at it again. Or you don't look at it again for several months when you finally muster up the courage to face what you created. But either way, you are spiraling because all you see is the mistakes that you made and not the things that you tried to create, the wonderful things that you probably created that just need to be revised and amplified and made better. So that's option one. Option number two is that you don't spiral. You start reading and you start noticing problems, but they are surface level problems. You notice typos, you notice descriptions that are super awkward, you notice dialogue that just isn't singing yet. And all of those things are important, but they are not first draft revision priorities. What you're looking at is the trees. You or not even the trees. You are hiking with your eyes on the ground looking for branches and rocks and things that you're going to trip over. And that is not the priority.
Like I said at the beginning of this episode, we need to be at the ten thousand foot view when we are talking about first drafts. So if your eyes are glued to your sentences and all you're seeing is the awkward phrasings, you're not paying attention to the plot of your story.
And that is a problem. And you might be wondering, but what's so bad about that? I need to edit, I need to fix typos, I need to make my dialogue great. And yes, you do eventually, not in revision. Revision is not typos. Revision is not looking at your scenes and sentences and perfecting them. Um well scenes somewhat, but not in the sense of trying to get your descriptions perfect. That is not revision. Revision is looking for plot holes.
Revision is looking at your structure. Revision is ensuring you have character arcs and that your conflict develops in a logical way, that you have enough conflict over the course of your story, and it's the right type of conflict for the story you're trying to tell. Revision is making sure that you have hit all of the expectations for your genre and that those scenes are in place where they need to be and actually good enough for your readers. We are not looking for the nitty gritty when we revise. All of that stuff comes later in the process. Those are editing tasks.
When we're revising, we need to get up in our helicopter and we need to look at the forest as a whole. We might decide that there's an entire section that we need to do a controlled burn in. We need to get rid of that whole section so that something else can flourish. We might realize that there's a section that it needs some love. It needs to have more trees planted. Or maybe we're going to expand our forest. We're going to start planting new seeds.
Maybe there is a certain kind of tree that we need to weed out from the entire forest as a whole. Now this metaphor is really hitting its limit. But when we are revising, we might be cutting scenes, adding scenes, completely rewriting scenes. You might be deleting a character. You might be adding a character. You might take two characters and make them into one person because they can share the job and make your cast a little less overwhelming. You might decide that your romance plot just is not working and you need
Five more romantic scenes, or we need to change the romance from rivals to true enemies or from enemies to rivals, whatever it is. Those things are happening in revision and those are big changes. You're not going to see the issues that require changes at that scale when your eyes are glued to the page and you are just reading sentence by sentence. Um, you might see the effect of those things, um, but most often, even if you can see the effect of those issues.
They are going to get misdiagnosed as other problems that are happening at the sentence level. so many of us, when we were in school, revision or editing just meant reading through the thing, looking for awkward phrases. And we didn't really care if it worked as a whole because the only person reading our story was the teacher. And they were just using a rubric to check off.
Some basic things. We weren't thinking about the experience that our teacher was going to have as they were reading our essay, unless we were a kid who was like really trying to get our grade up at the end of the semester. And maybe we put in like a little cute note to the teacher, like, Hi Miss, I hope that you're enjoying this and having a great day. I did get a few of those as a teacher, but otherwise, no one cared about my reading experience. I never made a student care about my reading experience when we were just doing basic essays.
I've talked a little bit about my uh grand experiment as a teacher when I realized that what I was teaching my students to do in class was not what professional writers do. And that is when I actually made my students set goals for the experiences that readers would have. That is when I actually made my students revise to make their story work on a structural level and on a sentence level, because we need to do both. And yes, you might be able to revise a short story by just reading through it because you can hold
The entire thing in your head at once. The same is not true of a 500-page novel. It's just not going to happen. And so we need to do something different. Again, I am going into the how, the what, the when in my masterclass, Fix your first draft. But at a basic level, we need to make sure we are looking at the high level. That is not going to happen if you're just sitting down and reading your manuscript. There might be exceptions to that rule, but I'm just going to generally say we need a different strategy for that messy first draft and where I see the show up quite tragically sometimes. Um, or not tragically because these are people who have still gotten help, but I occasionally have people come to me for editing and they have already attempted to query. They are not understanding why they are getting rejections because they revised, they edited, or at least they thought they did. And when I go into their stories, I see first draft problems. And no, it's not their first draft, it might be their fifth draft or their sixth draft, but they never did the work of actual structural revisions. They never did the work of making sure that every piece of their story was working for readers. And I can usually tell within my sample edits are only 10 pages max. And usually I can see giant red flags that explain exactly why they were rejected just in those first 10 pages, which is not what I want for you. That is why I want you to approach your first draft with the right mindset. I want you to know what your story needs to do overall so that you can do the work you need to in your first draft and then do the work you need to in your second draft and you know your third draft or however many you get to different people have different editing preferences. The point is that your first draft needs a specific kind of revision that is high level and it's not just sitting down and reading your manuscript. You are not going to get there and you or at least you're not going to get there in the most efficient way if you're just sitting down and reading. And you might have been told to do that. It might feel comfortable, it might feel exciting. You want to print off your copy and you know what? Do that. Print off a copy if that makes you happy but you're not going to sit down and just read it trying to look for problems. You're going to use that printed copy
To generate a reverse outline or to, you know, figure out some other kind of plot analysis that you can do. Um, reverse outlining is not your only option. I personally think it is the best option. Obviously, we'll be talking about that on the 17th, but that is where I want you to start. Do not just sit down and read your manuscript because we don't want to start editing before we have revised.
Because editing before you revise is like plating your dinner before you cook it. And you could plate it in the most beautiful way. You could have top chef level mastery using tweezers, placing your microgreens, your garnish. But if that food isn't cooked, nobody wants it. No one wants it.
If you serve me raw chicken, I don't care how beautiful it looks. It's still raw chicken. I don't want it. And your draft is the same same way. You can have beautiful sentences, beautiful descriptions, you can have dialogue that absolutely sings. But if your plot makes no sense, if your characters fall flat because they have no arcs, they have no depth, they have no meaning, if your structure is absent and all you have is beautiful descriptions that go nowhere and mean nothing.
No one's gonna want to read that book. That is not the job to just be beautiful. Um, some of you listening might write literary fiction, and a lot of your job is to be beautiful, but there still needs to be some story there. There still needs to be a story that people want to read. It still needs to work on a high level, which means plot, conflict, character arcs all need to be solid. Then
Go do your plating, make it beautiful. I have now combined so many metaphors here. Uh, but to go back to our forest, we start at 10,000 feet, we make sure the shape of the forest overall is healthy. Then we go down to the ground and then we start hiking through every inch of the forest, looking for the little things the edits that is when we start trimming branches, moving rocks out of the way, etc. So.
There is a time and a place for both of those things. We just need to make sure that our first draft is getting what it needs and nothing that it doesn't. All right. Thank you so, so much for listening to episode 48 of the Better Writer Podcast. As a reminder, I am running a masterclass on November 17th at 4 p.m. Eastern. I would love to see you there. The class is $17 if you register by November 4th. After that, it goes up to $27. And something I forgot to mention earlier is that I am going to be giving all class registrants early access to my Black Friday sale. You will also get an extra $50 off coupon for my Black Friday sale. and it's going to be the best Black Friday deal I have ever run.
I haven't actually run a lot of Black Friday sales, so this one is really special. And if you are someone who is revising or about to revise, this Black Friday deal is for you. So come join the class. Only $17. And then you get an extra $50 off that amazing Black Friday deal, which you will find out about early on the 17th. Um, and just you know, it's not gonna be huge pitch. I'm going to mention it, I'm going to invite you to, you know, access it early, but
Majority of the class, all two hours, is going to be focused on you, on your revision on what your first draft needs, and mapping out your best next step. So I hope to see you there on the 17th. The link to register is going to be wherever you are watching or listening to this show, or you can find it at Oliviahelpswriters.com, which is my website. You should see a pop-up and a banner both announcing this class because I want to see as many of you there as possible.
All right. Thank you again for listening to the show. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing, keep getting better, one word at a time.
See ya.
