Amanda T. Fox

            Most writers go into writing a book with a basic understanding of what each layer of writing entails: an outline, a rough draft, a revised draft, and the final draft. Often, we as writers want that first draft to be absolutely perfect, ready to publish with grammar, spelling, format, structure, detail, and continuity on point. So, when we finally go through to read that first draft, it can be really easy to feel discouraged when the hopes we pinned on that first draft being perfect aren’t met. For me, being a hard perfectionist, it used to be wildly disheartening to read a story I thought was incredibly well written and ready to go turn out to need so much work, sometimes to the point of an entire re-write, just to fix it.

So, I devised a way of looking at the process that makes it seem much less intimidating. I’m a big fan of metaphors, so when I consider sitting down to write that first draft, I have trained myself to see the work in progress as a body. I know this may seem like a gruesome way to view it, but bear with me and I’ll explain. That rough draft and/or outline is the skeleton of the work, the revised draft is the muscle added to the bones, then the final draft is the skin, the thing that makes it look more human. Or bookish, in this case.

The Skeleton

This is where the beginnings of the book start to form. It’s where we decide how it’s going to begin, where it will end, what happens to get from one to the other, and where we start to see the story unfold. It’s the first version that gets that story down on paper, so to speak, and gives us the foundation to work on that we can build upon.

It’s exciting to get writing down that story idea that you’ve worked so hard on, and that urge to create just pushes you to write it down as fast as you can before you lose momentum, and this is the perfect stage to do exactly that. Don’t place your worries on getting grammar and spelling perfect at this stage. This is the fun, creative stage, so let it flow, let it come to you, let the story tell itself until you reach that satisfying end, whatever that may be. It’s not a full body, it’s not the finished product, but it is the starting point, which means we can only build on from here. After all, skeletons don’t get up and walk on their own now, do they?

The Muscle

            Ah, the part where we’ve seen the skeleton, and we see the work that needs to be put in to give the book some bulk. Discouragement can happen easiest here, but this is where we, as writers, get to shine. After we’ve read the skeleton of the book, we begin to notice that we didn’t put in the details as much as we thought we did, that there’s plot holes and grammar and spelling issues. This is where our belief that we can write begins to fall, but the truth of this stage, while it can seem discouraging, is that we get to relive the story again. It’s where we get to picture it in our minds more clearly, because the foundation is already there, so now we can focus on those details that we missed, such as, how did the room look when you walk into it in your mind?

Take it one sentence at a time and remember that this story is unique and beautiful because it is yours. It’s your voice, and this is your world that you’ve created, full of characters and places created from your mind. Even if it seems daunting, it’s oftentimes easier to focus on the current sentence you’re on and not all the sentences that come after.

The Skin

            And now that the bulk has been added, and the flow of the story is where we want it, it’s time to address those pesky grammar and spelling issues. I’m sure we’ve fixed a bunch of those during the muscle phase, but building the muscle phase is primarily focusing on the content and not so much the formatting. For me, the skin phase is proofreading, making sure we didn’t miss anything, that everything is polished and ready for print. This can be a frustrating stage as well, because the bulk of the work has been done now, and often, we will still miss things. When those moments happen, it’s important to remember that even our literary heroes have made mistakes in their works. I’m sure there will be spelling or grammar issues in this article, no matter how many times I read through it (insert laughing emoji here, lol). But the skin phase is where we close the body of the book up to make it ready to go. It’s also where we add things like page numbers, cover pages, and copyright pages, which I will cover in another article soon.

Creating a body of work can seem daunting, but looking at it as stages of building an actual body can really help to put things in perspective, which, I think, is an important part of being an author. In those moments of discouragement, no matter what stage you’re on, take a second to imagine what it will be like to hold your finished book in your hands. The smell of the pages, the sight of the cover, the weight of it in your hands, and the knowledge that you added the bulk it needed to create a story that will be someone’s favorite novel one day. We can get through writing that first or third or tenth novel, as long as we remember that it is the process, not the finish line, that makes it all worth it in the end. 😊

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