The first draft of your novel is finished. Now, according to the recommendations of any number of writing books, pundits, and writers who go through this themselves, you’re in for five or ten or more rounds of revision, in which you’ll polish your work until it is a gleaming, perfect pearl ... and in which process you’ll dither for months or years.
You can do that if you want. But you don’t have to. It isn’t the way I work. I find a lot of truth in the adage, “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how are you ever going to find time to fix it later?”
Which is not to say that my first drafts are perfect – far from it. My first drafts suffer from the same little shop of horrors as everyone else’s: poor plotting, crappy characterization, logic leaps, redundancy, aimless wandering, bad writing, worse writing, and utterly execrable writing.
But my first revision is my last revision. If you’d like to cut years off the process of revising, I’ll be happy to show you how."
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