Beginning the Chronicles: 5 Lessons From Draft One
Musings on why writing your first book is so damn hard.
Welcome to Chronicles of the Craft, the corner where I leave all the thoughts, musings, and emotional outbursts of my journey as a writer. Don’t mind the mess.
Finishing the first draft of A World Beyond the Unknown felt like standing at the top of a mountain—exhilarating, victorious, like I had done the impossible. I had a book. A whole book.
And then I read it.
Turns out, I didn’t have a book. I had bare bones—a skeleton of a story, missing muscle, heart, and connective tissue. The plot wandered. The characters existed but didn’t evolve. Scenes happened, but they didn’t always matter. It wasn’t a bad story, but it was thin. So I did what every writer does: I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
Here are five lessons I learned from taking my first draft from 62,550 words to 123,737 (and counting).
Your First Draft Is Not a Book. It’s a Blueprint.
The hardest part of writing a book? Getting to the end. That’s it. Draft one doesn’t need to be pretty, well-structured, or even good. It just needs to exist.
I wrote my first draft between July and November 2023—62,550 words that told the story in the simplest way possible. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But when I went back to read it, I realized I had built a house without thinking about the foundation.
No plot structure.
No real arcs for my characters.
No tension pulling the reader forward.
It was like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were the same color. I had to step back and see the bigger picture.
Outlining After the First Draft Saved My Story
Since I hadn’t started with an outline, I had no idea if my story actually worked. So I did what I probably should’ve done earlier: I wrote a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of everything that happened.
Then I:
✅ Rearranged scenes that flowed better in a different order.
✅ Combined moments that felt redundant.
✅ Cut anything I had already said better elsewhere.
This became my real outline—one I could edit like a roadmap instead of reading and rereading 300+ pages whenever I wanted to tweak something. 10/10 would recommend.
Editing a Novel Over and Over Again Is a Special Kind of Madness
Rereading an entire book over and over again? Tedious. Soul-draining. Feels like staring into the void. But necessary.
By February 2024, my book had grown to 106,541 words, and I thought, Yes. This is the book.
It wasn’t.
I went through three more revisions after that, bringing me to 123,737 words—adding depth, layering emotions, and sharpening the dialogue. Every time, I thought I was done. Every time, I wasn’t.
Reading the same book that many times plays tricks on your brain. You start questioning if the entire thing is garbage. You convince yourself you’ve over-edited, ruined it, stripped the life from it. But each pass made it stronger, whether I could see it in the moment or not.
Writing a book is one kind of battle. Editing it is war.
Editing Backwards and Using Text-to-Speech = Game-Changers
Two tricks I picked up from other writers that saved my life:
📌 Edit backwards. Start from the last chapter and work your way to the beginning. It forces your brain to focus on details instead of skimming.
📌 Use text-to-speech. Hearing someone else read your book out loud makes awkward phrasing scream at you. Also, it's hilarious when the robot voice butchers fantasy names.
One of my characters is named Xina (short for Alexina), which should be pronounced “Zee-nah”. No matter what I did, Robot Reader 12000 insisted on “She-nah” like some kind of medieval weather app.
Ridiculous pronunciation aside, listening to my own words helped me hear pacing issues, clunky dialogue, and sentences that needed tightening. It’s now a mandatory step in my revision process.
Structure Matters—Even If You’re a Discovery Writer
I didn’t plan my first book. I just wrote. But once I started plotting Book 2, I did something radical: I mapped out the big moments before I started drafting.
I made sure my highlights aligned with classic story structure:
Inciting Incident (where the adventure begins)
Midpoint Shift (the game-changing realization)
Climax (the moment everything hinges on)
Having this structure in place? A lifesaver. It gave my second book a stronger foundation from the start—something I wish I had done for Book 1.
Final Thought: Draft One Is Just the Beginning
A book isn’t finished when you type “The End.” That’s where the real work starts. But every draft—every added layer—brings it closer to being the story it was meant to be.
Draft One is the bones. Revisions are where the soul comes to life.
Anyways, happy writing.
Magnolia 🌿