What Happens When You Don’t Finish Your Dang Rough Draft Before You Edit? A Lesson from the Choir Room. I’m a choir boy. I was raised by choir directors. I always try to sing in a local choir.
There’s an analogy in choir rehearsing for us writers.
I have a pet peeve. It’s when directors are not able to help themselves but to stop as soon as we’ve sung one note and it’s not perfect, especially early in the rehearsal season, months away from the concert.
Two things happen with this kind of constant stopping:
- The choir loses their mind, especially if the director is working with only one part.
- We might not get the whole piece learned as well as those parts, because we’ll run out of time.
The choir I sing in just got a new director and she is a master at running a rehearsal.
She seems to have the discernment to know what doesn’t need to be fixed right away and the courage to leave it for now. She knows what the musicians will work out on their own in time and only stops if necessary. It’s a breath of fresh air if you’re used to the opposite.
It reminds me of the great advice to just sit down and write a sh#@ty rough draft. Just do it. Get through it.
But most people can’t. They can’t help themselves. They go back after every page or paragraph and try to fix it, make it perfect.
But the problem with this is twofold: one, you just may never finish the dang book. And two, your corrections will be very different once you’ve seen a draft of the whole piece. In other words, you’re wasting your time going back now.
One Caveat
You need to have done some work to develop a great outline before you started the rough draft. I get manuscripts all the time that are 60,000 words that are more than sh#@ty, because they are totally purposeless and repetitive. That’s very hard to deal with on the second draft, because now you have to do what you should have done with the first—make an outline!
Here’s my favorite way to start a book, assuming it’s a transformational book, meaning, the reader is supposed to read it for some life change.
Step 1: Know who this is for. Pick an audience. Possibly an earlier version of you.
Step 2: Know what you want them to know and do so you can write a transformational core message to build upon. The statement alone should change their life if they only believed you. Example: Jesus came to save sinners, and if you put your faith in Him and His work on the cross to pay for your sins, you will be forgiven, reconciled with God, and His friend for eternity.
Step 3: Consider a process that walks them through understanding why your core message is true, and how to apply it.
Step 4: Write a detailed outline on that process where every chapter has a job that moves the reader toward the transformation and the action.
Step 5: Write your sh#@ty rough draft, AND DON’T STOP UNTIL IT’S DONE.
Step 6: Now you get to go back and edit it.
Thank you, and good day.
Jeff B. Miller
