Hack Yourself Tricks: the "Reader Draft"

The first draft of your novel isn't meant to be read by a stranger.

You need it to get to the next draft, of course. Gotta start somewhere. But that first time through isn't good enough to show someone. Some parts wouldn't make sense to anyone but you - they need clarification. Other parts may be unnecessarily repetitive because you were working out the plot on the page, dumping exposition for your own understanding of the plot that you'd never include in the final draft. Still other parts might just be the bare bones outline of a scene, plot points jotted down so you get the idea out of your head. "He opens the door, there's a monster, there's some kind of fight, he wins." You know what happens in the scene, but it's not ready to be read by anyone else.

There are exceptions. I have this notion Stephen King types novels start to finish with no outline and no revisions and emails them directly to a printing press so it ships to bookstores the next morning. That's probably not true. But a seasoned novelist can likely produce a readable first draft.

That's not me. I need to write a few bad drafts to figure out what the book is.

But at some point you need "the actual book". You need a readable draft. And for me, after too many drafts of my current project, I had a depressing realization: I didn't yet have a whole book written I could hand someone and say, "here it is, read it."

When you hit the 50th draft, you've done something wrong.

I had been working on the same novel for years, reworking scenes, sketching out sequences, reordering events, and even thinking certain chapters were done when, reading them back, they begged for obvious adjustments.

What I wanted was the thing to read like a "real book", even if it wasn't brilliant. What does that mean? A real book takes over your imagination. One sentence in, you're no longer reading as much as seeing the story happen. The writing disappears. You see the people and the places and feel the tension. If it's really good, that magic happens where you are wondering what's going to happen next. So you have this urge to turn the page.

Bad writing trips up this experience. A sentence is confusing, or a word hits that doesn't fit. You're taken out of the story. It reminds you, you're reading words someone wrote. You put the book down and check Instagram.

When I read my work in progress, it didn't meet that "real book" standard. It was thousands of words struggling to become readable. I couldn't get past a single sentence without seeing glaring adjustments to make. Frankly, there were whole chapters that seemed to be written by an idiot.

In fairness, the plot was good, the story was worked out. There was a fun book in there somewhere. I just needed to, well, write it.

The fake but effective"Reader Draft"

I decided I would start at the beginning and write something I called "The Reader Draft". It was my way of getting real. Like, "hey, I love your fun idea for a thriller but enough already, let's write the thing that will be in stores."

Calling something a "Reader Draft" is meaningless -- it's just the name of a file. Except I decided it would have consequence. This would be a draft I would hand someone other than me to actually read.

That small thought raised my awareness of my writing. In a way, it changed everything. It's different, writing knowing you're going to 'turn it in', or 'post it', or give it to someone you care about. I was writing but now there was a "reader" in me along for the ride, imagining how a stranger would experience this, making adjustments, changing the order of thoughts to hit the reader the right way, smoothing out sentences so they read through with no bumps in the logic, clearing up any confusion in events, in character intention, in the internal logic of what was happening.

As I get to the last few chapters, it may not be the greatest book ever but it will be a book. Meaning I can hand it to a stranger and, at minimum, they'd understand what I was going for.

If you read your latest draft and feel you'd be embarrassed if anyone saw it, maybe try the trick where you start fresh and tell yourself you are now going to write the "Reader Draft". (That last sentence could use some work.)