Write First with Your Head, Then Revise with Your Heart

By Caroline Donahue — THE BOOK DOCTOR

After how long January feels, February seems to flash past, a quick five minutes. In the midst of this zooming month, I have begun revising my novel.

So far, the daunting steps of reading the first draft over several times and considering whether the structure is really working have been completed. As I waded through scenes that took me years to write, only to make judgements on whether they are, as Heidi Klum used to say on Project Runway, “In” or “Out,” I was struck with the realization that a first draft and later ones have entirely different intentions.

A first draft is for the head. We need to understand a lot of things through writing a first draft. To be clear, you may write many sections of a book many times in a first draft. But for the sake of clarity, I think of a first draft as the first time you’ve written a piece all the way through to the end and have been able to type THE END, if only to delete it immediately afterward.

This first draft is to understand what happens in the book. This is true for fiction as well as memoir. Anything with a narrative. We are writing that first draft to understand the scope, to know what is part of the story, who the players are, what they are like, and what span of their lives we will…