Untitled. From the set “Cuervos”.
Photograph of Street Art. 2010.
La Mesa / El Messa | flickr.com/photos/el_messa
This series takes an unpopular approach to editing fiction. It’s been said by smart, successful people in the industry that the biggest difference between an unpublished author and a published one is a finished manuscript — so amateur authors had best not spend their time worrying about perfecting their first drafts, and just get it down on paper.
I don’t agree. A finished manuscript is the absolute bare minimum you need to be published at a reputable publishing house; if you can’t produce one of those, you’re sunk whether it’s polished or not. It’s like telling aspiring film stars that their primary hurdle is whether or not they possess a face; it’s true, but useless. The writing professionals who tell you to “just get it down” are making a mistake: an unconscious assumption of a minimum of quality in prose that is “just got down”. Their standard for first draft prose is not the same as your standard for “just get it down”, not by a long chalk. Their first draft will likely resemble your final draft — and they’ll have written it in half the time. (Although it is true that if you’ve never written a novel-length work before, you should do that before worrying about anything else — see post #1 in the “How to Edit Fiction” series.)
Before you can really aim for publication, you must first understand just how high standards in large trade publishing houses can be. If you live in the United States, you’re lucky: the market is big enough to support a good many debut authors. In the U.K. it’s a different story: major publishers will release one or two debut SFF novels in a given year. That’s fantasy and sci-fi put together. Have a read of one of the best-kept secrets in the SFF community: this Q&A thread with one of the most revered names in publishing, agent to Hannu Rajaniemi, and the man who first published Wheel of Time in the U.K., John Jarrold. My statistics are from Mr. Jarrold’s posts.
If you want to be published by a major house, you must make certain you produce a debut novel that agents and publishers simply can’t turn down. Well, shit — that’s an impossible task. Truly, it is; nobody knows what the market wants, not even industry pros. They can only make some very educated guesses.
Being published at a major house is difficult and few people manage. Being successful with a small house or at self-publishing is just as difficult. If you want it, if you really want it, you must be ruthless with yourself, and that means raising your standards.
not very alice 
Ava Jae
December 10, 2011
Looking forward to the future posts in the series, Alice! I think when most people say that you shouldn’t be afraid to write a bad draft (and I say this because I’m one of them), it’s that we’re assuming that after you have a “bad” draft, you have something to work with. Even if it’s a mess and you have to rewrite it a dozen times, you still had a starting point. Some writers (especially new writers) get so caught up in how bad their manuscript is, that they never finish, and thus they don’t have a starting point.
Granted, if you take the time to write a more polished first draft, you probably won’t have to rewrite nearly as much. I think in the end it’s certainly good to write the best first draft you can (you shouldn’t slack off on any stage, of course), but if what you end up with isn’t as good as you’d hoped (and it rarely is), then that’s ok. That’s what rewriting is for.
That being said, it’s always a great thing to learn techniques that can improve the quality of any draft, so you know I’ll be checking out your posts. 😀
Alice M.
December 10, 2011
I agree there’s no first draft so awful it can’t be rewritten. However, after a certain point of awfulness the amount of work that needs to be done is so great that the writer’s time is better spent learning to draft in the first place.
Writing is a skill, just like any other art. You have to learn the basics before you can produce anything worth polishing up to publication standard, in exactly the same way a professional artist had to learn to draw. This is the opinion they take at conceptart.org: their standards are high, and if you post a polished turd in the “finally finished” thread it will get buried in other posts and downvoted immediately. Members will tell you to learn how to draw before posting in that thread again.
This is exactly the same mentality. I’m not advocating that people who just enjoy writing take this stance; what I suggest is that if you want to be a *professional*, you need to hold yourself to a realistically high standard.
Edited to add: I don’t think new writers of the category you mention need egging on to finish their books. If they’re the kind of person who has writing on the brain they’ll keep doing it regardless of whether they think they’re any good or not, because they’re not doing it for any other reason than to write. If they then decide they want to write professionally, the best advice you can give them is to aim high.