First of all, 80% isn’t bad! When this happens to me, it tends to be around the 30% mark.

Anyway: you’ve no doubt been told that everyone looks back at earlier parts of their draft and thinks it’s garbage, and you just gotta trust that this is the way of first drafts and you’ll make it into the story you want it to be when you revise. But it’s hard to take that in emotionally even if you know it intellectually, and motivation is a feeling, not a thought.

When this happens to me, it soothes me to go back to a few parts and make some preliminary revision notes. Not mean, critical notes, but neutral, factual ones - “I’d like to make her fear more palpable in this passage” - “flesh out this description a bit” - “I’ll rework this scene to match that earlier detail I changed” - “[rambling about what’s going on in a character’s head that I’d like to make more evident]” - that sort of thing. Doing this reassures me that I will turn this story into the story I’d envisioned, even if it isn’t there yet. Also, it might allow me to work through issues whose vagueness was making it harder to move forward (for instance, if I never quite knew why a character was doing something).

Let me stress: I don’t actually revise at this point, I only make notes for the revision. And I don’t do it too heavily or for too long, or even for the whole draft. I do it enough that I regain some of my confidence and then I return to drafting.

Here’s my main advice: do not think about this at all while you are drafting, deal with it when you revise. For most writers, the real writing happens during revision. If you obsess over your prose while you’re drafting, you’ll get tied in knots, so give yourself permission (and frequently remind yourself) to be as repetitive as your mind wants to be. Just let it do its thing.

When you do start revising, make note of the words and phrases you use too much and add them to your list of “things to change.”

I have a bunch of words on this list that I cut altogether when possible. “Just” is a big offender, as is “in a way that.” Any intensifying adverbs like “really.” Time or causal conjunctions like “then” or “because.” I also try to strengthen my verbs and cut phrases I don’t always need (like “try to”). I look for ways to vary my sentence rhythm. I find spots where I could be more specific and expand them. (Usually these reveal themselves through some version of the word “thing.”)

(And by the way, these are not rules. They’re what I want to sound like, not what I think everyone should sound like.)

I would never try to get these elements right the first time. My mind can only handle a limited number of tasks at a time and fussing over my prose distracts me from telling the story.

(This isn’t to say I ignore language altogether. The prose in my drafts does have some style. But I don’t obsess over words and phrases I’d consider “mistakes” in a final draft.)

(Previous post for ref)

The quick and not-very-helpful answer is that I haven’t seen anyone talk specifically about third-draft blues - just, as you said, revision blues in general. Followers, have any of you run across discussions of this?

But lemme see if I can take a shot myself. (Your process actually seems like a cool way of working, by the way. If we can get to the bottom of the third draft issue, that is!)

First of all: I wonder if you get that confidence crisis because once you start editing the new material, it feels like this is your last chance to get it right and truly make the story ready for prime time. In that case, the challenge is to take some of that pressure off yourself - to give yourself the option of a fourth draft. I mean, this is only the second draft for the new material, so there’s no reason you have to nail it on this round.

Another possibility is that you’ve hit that point where you’ve been through the story several times and you’re sick of it and you’re wondering how you can possibly salvage this piece of garbage. This happens to most writers at one point or another, whether it’s several drafts in or midway through the first draft. Plus in your specific case, you’ve just spent all this energy adding new material to the story that was supposed to make it all come together and if it doesn’t feel like it has all come together, that’s super discouraging. The challenge is just to recognize it’s happening and remind yourself that your mind is playing tricks on you - the story doesn’t suck, it just feels like it because you’ve spent so much time with it and you’re sick of looking at its stupid face.

I can’t know for sure, of course, but I strongly suspect it has something to do with feeling let down by the major revisions you did in the second draft - they don’t feel like they transformed the story as much as you intended them to, or something like that. It might help at this point to get some outside input from someone who doesn’t know what the first draft looked like. Because of course you can compare the drafts and judge the second one by how much it improved on the first, but your reader can only react to the story as it is now.

First of all, you should always stop sooner than you think. It will feel bad, but that’s how it is: when you go into revision/editing mode, you will lose perspective.

Second of all, I can’t remember who said this, but they said “you should stop revising when the improvements you make to one part start breaking other parts.” I’m not sure how I’d implement this, personally, but it might strike a chord with you?

Third of all, yes, a checklist can help. And it helps to prioritize. Do the biggest stuff first - so, any major narrative and characterization changes, sections that need to be cut or expanded, that sort of thing. Next, identify your second-tier changes - passages with clunky prose, etc. This is where I tend to get carried away, personally, so I have to give myself an actual time limit. Line-editing goes at the end. Hell, you might just hand it off to a friend for proofreading at this point.

For one thing, I’d guess this is about more than just the draft. It sounds like anxiety seizing ahold of the first thing it can find. So, if you have steps to take for managing anxiety in general, I’d take them.

Something I figured out when I was teaching writing: if you want a student to learn from your comments on their work, you can’t just tell them what they did wrong. They need to hear what they did right so they can do more of that in the future. Revising an essay should not be about “fixing” or “correcting it,” it should be about maximizing what’s good about it.

My therapist has been talking about “learning history” recently. Your learning history is just what experience has taught you, how it has shaped your subconscious beliefs. This includes emotions that habitually come up in certain situations. If your learning history with writing is I always fail and it’s always painful, your brain will expect pain so confidently that it will produce that pain in advance. You’ll have barely started writing before you’re like “this is horrible and I never want to do it again.” You have learned to feel bad every time you write - maybe even every time you think about writing. Writing literally triggers you.

To unlearn that learning history, you need new experiences that don’t tell the same story as the old ones. If you feel the same crippling pain every time you write, stop doing it the way you’re doing it. Following the same pattern just reinforces your habitual thoughts and feelings around writing and makes it hurt more.

It would be banal of me to say you’ve got to “make writing fun again.” If you knew how, you would. What I recommend, for writers in rehab, is to make it not matter quite so much. Remove the high stakes.

Usually, the stakes we place on writing aren’t realistic anyway. You will not solve all your problems and become a better, happier person by writing well. If you were more “talented,” you would not be any less lonely or depressed. Getting better at writing (or finishing a novel or whatever your goal is) will not transform your life. (Those were my unacknowledged beliefs about writing, anyway. I don’t know what yours are.)

So let go of all that. Everything we write is just marks in the sand.

One of my secret beliefs about writing, for a long time, was that it required a lot of thinking. I would think so hard about a story before putting down a single word that I could literally feel my head twist inside. Through this repeated experience, I taught myself that good writing (at least for me, a person with no “natural talent”) required incredible mental strain.

This just isn’t true. Sure, writing requires thinking, but it needn’t be strained thought. One is always thinking, and if one turns on the spigot and lets those thoughts run out onto the page, one will get something interesting sooner or later.

But regardless of the goal - whether I was looking for something “interesting” or not - I had to give myself the experience of not thinking while I wrote, to unprogram my learning history that said “writing always means tying your brain in knots.”

If writing hurts, think about your current writing regime. What do you do first? Whatever that is, do the opposite.

Do you open an empty document and stare at it for a while? Well, your job now is to write anything, literally anything, that comes to mind. You will grab whatever words are floating on the surface of your awareness and put them down. 

This isn’t your new rule for writing forever. You’re simply giving yourself new experiences that don’t repeat the same messages of the old ones. You are reshaping your emotional response to the situation of writing.

(Also, it will warm you up and relax you and clear the pipes, which is a good way to start any writing session.)

Do you start stories by planning them out like a military campaign and then never actually write them? Your job is to write something - anything - with no plan. Take, I dunno, five minutes to come up with a premise for a scene, and then jump in. Just babble like a six-year-old making up a story. 

Again, you don’t have to do this forever. You just need to experience writing differently for a while.

Some people have the opposite issue - they write in a rush of ideas and excitement, then reread the story, see a mess that would take a herculean effort to revise, and abandon it. Now, I actually think this is good - you don’t need to alter your approach to drafting, but to revising. 

Here’s your job: reread your draft, but don’t look for what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed. Instead, look for bits and pieces - phrases, ideas, moments of characterization - that you like. Collect them in a document and put the rest of the story away. Now take a step back and draw up a rough plan for a story that could include these bits and pieces. In other words, use your rushed-out story as a petrie dish to grow ideas for a new, more carefully constructed story. (This is a tried-and-true method of drafting for many well-known writers, by the way.)

(This was a reply to another post but I’m giving it a new one:)

@mumblingsage wrote in this post:

Disclaimer to the disclaimer: sometimes when I’m 1.0 drafting (after the zeroth draft where I outlined the story), I will deliberately push myself to practice different sentence structures because this is the point where I play around with my word choice. In revision, I figure out which sentences and paragraphs still need variety–or have too much variety, and need to be ironed out and made plainer and clearer.

For some people, messing around with words should be done in revision because the momentum of their first draft is more important. For other people, messing around with words is why we write anything in the first place.

But yeah, before you determine whether or not you have enough variety in your sentence structures you generally need to have a lot of sentences already on your page.

#what you worry about in which draft depends a lot on your exact process #for me saving all the 'good stuff' until the final draft is a recipe #for lots of abandoned WIPs #that I don't have the energy to edit

This is a great point. The moment we begin to consciously and deliberately shape our prose will differ for everybody. This blog most often addresses writers who believe they should be writing fully formed prose from the first moment, but find it impossible to finish anything that way. I just want those folks to know there are other ways. But not every writer’s mind will cotton to those ways. I know several writers who choose each word carefully, one after the other, until they reach the end. If that works, they should do it!

A big turning point for me was realizing when that conscious turn toward prose craft needed to happen in my process. It’s not that I write my zero draft with no regard for the language - it’s that I try to produce that language spontaneously, to make my first decisions without evaluation or even much proper thought. But those decisions aren’t always bad. Sometimes I keep large chunks of prose exactly the way I wrote them the first time! Sometimes, your first instinct is your best. More often, the pieces of good sentences fall out onto the page, and I revise them by relating them syntactically in a way that pleases my ear. It’s like, there’s a lot of gold dust in my zero draft (I’m just going to call it a zero draft now, because that’s apparently what it’s widely called!) and revision is a matter of sifting it.

But that’s my mind. I don’t think syntactically, I think in images and resonant but isolated words, and at first those elements all just fall out in a heap. Other writers, I suspect, think more musically, or more rhythmically - and you can’t have rhythm without syntax, so the creation of the story for them can’t be distinguished from the shapes of their sentences. It’s the well-formed sentence that drives their interest in the story. (This seems to be you, correct me if I’m wrong.)