Call a Writer: Holly Bourne on bad first drafts
'My manuscript looks like it’s haemorrhaging.'
Earlier this month, Holly Bourne – a bestselling author of fiction and young-adult fiction – posted a snapshot on Instagram of a printed page covered in angry scribbling. ‘I've got through an entire box of red ink cartridges since Monday morning,’ her caption began. ‘THIS is the reality of a second draft for me.’
So I asked Holly to be the first guest in what I hope will be a series for this newsletter: Call a Writer. Where the podcast allows me to do long, broad interviews with people who’ve usually just published something, Call a Writer is about short, deep dives with writers who are up to their ears in the process.
In Holly’s case, she generously told me how she turns a vomit draft into a polished manuscript. Below is an edited extract from our conversation (paid subscribers can listen to the phone-call itself, which is about twice the length of this. If you decide to upgrade your subscription after reading, you’ll find the audio here).
Hattie: How’s this morning been?
Holly: [laughing] That’s the crazy laugh of a writer in redrafting mode. It’s fine. I gave myself a certain number of pages that I wanted to get done by this morning and they’re done, so I’m feeling OK.
I asked you to chat because I saw your brilliant Instagram post – and you really put your finger on not only the problems we have with the craft of writing, but the problems that we have with our egos as well. When you came on the podcast, you talked about how your approach is to power through the first draft quickly, safe in the knowledge that it can be revised later. We often call that a vomit draft – so I wanted to start by asking you: how vomity is your vomit draft, typically?
They’re disgusting. There’s just a lot of vom all over the walls, or the pages. I never read a draft back when I’m writing one, because I know that I’ll hate it so much that I’ll lose all my confidence, and I won’t be able to continue.
Are you talking about problems on a sentence level, or is it the structure of the overall thing?
Sometimes it’s structure. I came across a note this morning, which – excuse my bad language – said something like, ‘Please write a paragraph that makes sense when your brain is fucking working in the edit.’ I just skipped a massive plot point because obviously on that day, I was blocked. But usually I can’t see the wood for the trees in my first draft. It’s over-written, it has loads of passive voice, loads of stream-of-consciousness where the character is telling you everything. The first thing I do is sit down and read it, which is always the worst part. But I can usually, in amongst the ego-ruining bad writing, be like, ‘Oh, you’ve got characters, and they have an arc, and you have a beginning and a middle and an end – you’re just going to have to get rid of so much badness to find them.’
To be honest, it sounds great to me that you’ve got those things in place after a first draft. What sort of planning do you do?
I’m always very jealous of the authors with spreadsheets. I know where the big moments are, and I have a general arc in my head, but a book plan has never been more for me than an A4 sheet of paper with some handwritten bullet points.
The problems I have are to do with hitting a point in the middle where I’m like, ‘I don’t know what’s supposed to happen for the next 40,000 words.’ So the fact that you just power through and come out with something that at least has a plot – I think you should feel really good about that.
No, I have a middle problem too! When I’m making that little bullet-point list, I’m like, ‘And then in the middle, plot will happen.’ But I just write through it, and when you do sit down and have that first really confronting read, you will be able to see – ‘That’s not needed, that’s not needed, that’s not needed.’ You have to write all the things that aren’t needed, especially in that middle part, in order to be like, ‘Oh, that scene actually is important, and these other six that I spent weeks of my life on are now just going into the bin.’
So would you tell me what you’ve done over the last couple of weeks to that first draft?
OK. I’ve got strong opinions here, but it’s what’s worked for me. Whatever works for you, do that, because it’s very different. But for me, rule one is – leave it alone for a minimum of two weeks, but I would say a month. You really need that distance.
Then you have to print it out. I believe that writing is getting worse because nobody edits on paper any more. It isn’t very good for my carbon footprint, but I never fly anywhere because I’m scared, and I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years, so I’m hoping…
You’ve earned it. You’ve earned that paper.
Then I sit down and read it like a book, just so I can get that overall idea of ‘Is the novel working? Is there good stuff in there?’ And that, I find, is the hardest part, because all you can see is problems and you’re not allowed to fix them yet, and it’s really demoralising reading this terrible attempt at the story that you were so excited about when you first started doing it. But I don’t get my red pen out yet. I just read it, and let that settle for a couple of days.
Then I do the most intense line edit, because you can’t tell if a book is good if each individual sentence is a little bit squiffy, and so I follow George Orwell’s six rules for writing. Number one: never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
Number two is never use a long word when a short word will do.
Number three is, if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Will the story survive without this word, without this sentence, without this paragraph? I am brutal. Especially as I use red pen, it does look quite violent when I redraft. My manuscript looks like it’s haemorrhaging.
Number four – never use the passive voice when you can use the active. I think we write first drafts in the passive voice because we’re scared. Lots of my sentence-tweaking is to make the characters do things rather than things being done to my characters.
Number five: never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
And then number six is ‘Break any of these rules’ – but I tend to follow them religiously, because they make every sentence work really hard. Then I have to go through and type in all the things, which is really boring. And then I print it off again, and kill more trees, and read it back, and then I don’t hate the book.
So how are you feeling now?
When I first read this draft I did what I normally do, which was to tell my husband that my career was over, and he said what he always says, which is, ‘You’ve said this a million times before – it is going to be OK.’ And then I go ‘No, but this book really is terrible.’ So I went through that, but actually now because I’m towards the end, I did just skip back to some pages that I had marked up and changed. I read them and thought no, it’s fine, you’re OK at your job. Readers might like this.
What would you say to other writers who are looking at their first draft and feeling despair?
That despair is the most useful thing for you as a writer, and you should channel it into making it better. Every author I know thinks that their book is an utter pile of crap after the first draft. The Whatsapps that come in: ‘I’ve just read it back. It’s over. I’m going to have to pay back my advance.’ And actually I’d be worried about an author who read a first draft and went, ‘This is genius, I’m obviously the next James Joyce, I’m going to win prizes, Hollywood’s coming knocking.’ Nobody writes good first drafts. The despair is part of the process.
Also – well done, you’ve written a book, and no one can ever take that away from you. Celebrate your terrible, terrible finished first draft, because it is an amazing achievement.
Buy Pretending by Holly Bourne now, and while you’re at it, why not pre-order her new book, Girlfriends, which is out in September? And here’s her episode of In Writing, recorded in 2019.
To listen to a longer version of this conversation on your podcast app, upgrade to a paid subscription for £4 a month.
That’s all until next Thursday. Good luck with your writing this week!