You just wrote the best post of your life. It's perfect. It's just perfect. You push "Post" and feel great about yourself.
Then you notice a mistake here, one there, yet another somewhere else. That seemingly perfect sentence? It's now askew and weird. What were you thinking?! You now edited 4 times and it's just not right. Eventually, you just give up. You'll do better next time.
Congratulations! You made the writer's mistake number one: You fell in love with your first draft!
I don't care who you are: Hemingway, Paulo Coelho or a random author on steemit, your first draft will always be the inferior version of whatever you try to write( literally the worst!). It's very easy to look at it and think that this the best you can do, you have no word left to add, after all. That's just your fear, disguised as common-sense, whispering in your ear. Ignore it.
Stephen King, in his book, "On Writing " ( which if you haven't read, you're doing yourself a great disservice ) says this:
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
The first draft's role is for you to put down all the ideas and sentences that dance around in your head, Pin them down on the (virtual)paper before the disappear into thin air, as ideas tend to do. After you did that, don't just release them into wild. That's the moment to really look closely at them!
What did you catch?! Maybe, it was exactly what you were looking for, the exact idea-specie that you expected. But maybe, actually more likely, you caught a very different beast than you set up to find. That's why you need to really analyze the first draft and see if you actually wrote what you wanted to write.
You see, writing tends to get a life of its own, the more space you give it, the more you write. Connection appear. Sentences metamorphosis. It shifts right before your eyes. It's MAGIC!
The first thing i'd do is let the draft settle. Yes, just let it settle. Move away from the computer, do something else, come back in an hour. You'll have a new perspective immediately! So many times, re-reading my first draft with new eyes helped me see just how shitty it was...but that's good! I could improve it.
After taking a long hard look at your writing, start by identifying your main THEME. What's the story REALLY about? It's not really easy to do that. I remember a little exercise our teacher asked as to do. Write a little story about how a day at the office looked for me. Here's an extract:
I have two monitors, each serves its own purpose. One is for excel, always opened to the right tab. The other for everything else. I look to the right and I'm automatically focused on te document, I look to the left and it's e-mails, facebook, stuff..."
I thought I was writing about my day. my workshop teacher correctly pointed out that the theme was CONTROL. It surprised me and with that in mind i hashed out the rest of the story and FOCUSED on the main theme.
Boom: 100% improvement.
With the theme in mind, move to the first sentence. The first sentence is the hardest sentence because it sets up the whole tone. I had re-write whole drafts because of bad first sentences.
Now try to look at the ending. IS it powerful to you, or sad, or a nice conclusion? The ending for me is like dessert, it can make or break a whole meal.
With that, you are ready to OPEN the window. Share it with a friend, your editor(if you are lucky enough to have one )or someone else you trust that they could give you some insight into what's missing (hint; something is ALWAYS missing)
Wait for their words to come back, take them in consideration and now re-write it again. That's the 3rd draft and might be very different from the first. No matter, it is certainly better. I'd bet my SBD on that!
From this on, you are on your own! If you have time, I'll let it stay overnight and look again in the morning. you'll naturally make new changes. If you are a perfectionist, definitely do that!
At last, to give you the dessert I promised! The best way to help your drafts is read other people's drafts. Try to help them, try to see what they do with your help and learn from it. Remember: to write is humane, to edit is divine : and respect that.
One day, you'll experience the unique joy of noticing just how bad your first draft is!
Then you can get to the real work :)
