first drafts & second chances

on revising your work & rewriting your story

This year, I’ve been doing a lot of redrafting. Here on Substack, for one: as I write my post each week, the initial skeleton of the piece I’d planned usually changes shape as I return to it over the course of a few days, the idea slowly morphing into something else until I’m ready to hit publish.

Redrafting has also made up the majority of the work I’ve done on my novel this year: I took a messy first draft and tightened it up, only to dispose of around half of what was left and reshape it into something new once more.

The edits are, despite taking up a lot of time and headspace, always worthwhile. They make the piece better. There may be a point at which I feel I’ve made things worse, the same feeling as reaching that particular moment where you’ve taken everything out of your cupboards to reorganise them but you can no longer imagine the new and improved storage system you’d dreamt up and so can do nothing but sit paralysed on your bed/sofa/floor while you gather the strength to continue. But, once you’re through that bit, you see that the agony of the tidying process was necessary. You made it to the other side, and are happy to find that the grass actually is greener there.

When my marriage ended, I struggled for a long time to see the experience I had gone through as net positive. Those first few months in particular, shuffling back and forth between my sister’s spare room in London and my childhood bedroom back home in Birmingham (via a not-insignificant amount of time in Euston station, god help me), I felt like my life had been completely uprooted. It was like I was playing a brutal board game where all my peers were climbing ladders to their next milestones, buying houses and getting promoted and having children, and I’d somehow managed to land on a snake that had me regressing to the years after university, telling my parents whether or not I’d be in for dinner and desperately trying not to become overwhelmed by needing to rebuild my entire life. During that period, I had about fifteen tabs permanently open to variations of the same simple grey kettle, struggled to buy a knife block online without the luxury of a place of my own to sign for the delivery (they don’t just let you order knives anonymously, it turns out), and worried about everything, from the smallest decision (which kettle?) to the biggest (where was I going to live, and how on earth was I going to pay for it?).

Now, I see that period completely differently: as an almost romantic time that I needed to go through in order to shed something that no longer served me, a second chance, a do-over, a redraft. Rebuilding took everything I had, or that’s how it felt, but my new life is one I love more than I could have imagined. I’ve written about this before, but there’s nowhere I would rather be than on the other side of that experience. The grass is greener here, too.

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All year, on and off, I’ve been reading If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. The book is made up of a series of short meditations on writing, with advice ranging from the practical to the spiritual, and the collection ends with numbered instructions for those who want to write. They include:

3. Write freely, recklessly, in first drafts.

6. Don’t fret or be ashamed of what you have written in the past. How I always suffered from this! How I would regurgitate out of my memory (and still do) some nauseous little lumps of things I had written! But don’t do this… It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

A couple of days after I finished reading If You Want to Write, I attended a celebration event held by London Writers Centre (the artist formerly known as Spread the Word) featuring a commissioned poem by momtaza mehri, and one line in particular stood out to me. I surreptitiously pulled out my phone to write it down in my Notes app so that I didn’t end up unable to remember it on the Victoria line home. It was short, simple, powerful: first drafts and second chances.

This line of Mehri’s poem and Ueland’s set of instructions for writers are so thematically intertwined, despite the 87 years that separate them (Ueland’s book was first published in 1938, and she died before Mehri was born). There was a real synchronicity in coming across both of them within the span of a few days.

Of course, their advice is particularly valuable for writers. When the novel I worked on for two years went on submission to publishers in late 2023, the project did not sell. I opened the document back up in the last few days, a morbid curiosity getting the better of me, and I was horrified to realise that I now saw parts of it exactly as Ueland describes: nauseous little lumps of things I had written. Of course it didn’t sell, I told myself. How shameful, how embarrassing. Still, I’d found it within me to continue, to move on to a new project and throw myself into that, instead. A first draft, a second chance.

Now, I’m on my third draft of the new novel. Some days, I feel frustrated about the time I have wasted on the previous iterations of the project. On other days, days where I am being slightly kinder to myself, I know I needed to write the previous drafts to get to this one, that I wouldn’t have these words on the page if it weren’t for the earlier versions. It’s the same with my life now: I wouldn’t be where I am today if things hadn’t unfolded the way they did. So, though I went through a painful process to get here, I wouldn’t undo it. Strangely enough, I’d keep things exactly the same.

Maybe I am leaning too much into an end of year reflective melancholy, but isn’t life one big draft, really? Aren’t we constantly editing, revising, making changes when we realise the choice we made isn’t actually fulfilling us as we’d hoped? And isn’t having a second chance, third chance, fourth chance at putting things together differently - isn’t that the most exciting prospect of all?

Like many, I am in the process of thinking about my goals and intentions for 2026, and though I haven’t committed to anything concrete just yet, one thing I know for sure is this: I want to treat 2026 as a new draft. I want to allow myself to be playful and to make mistakes and to edit and revise as I go. Maybe, if everything works out as I plan it, this time next year I’ll be right where I hope to be. If it doesn’t, maybe I’ll be somewhere better.

A note to say: as I sat waiting for the central line at Holborn station this weekend, I took out my phone to make the final edits to this piece. A train pulled in, and there were so many people waiting on the platform that I stayed seated, deciding to wait for the train behind it. The doors whooshed open, people descended, the people waiting stepped on, the doors whooshed closed, the train left again. As the crowds moved towards the exit, a chorus of women’s voices rose from somewhere towards the back of the platform. I paused, raised my head to identify what they were singing. Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten, a noughties classic. As their voices swelled, the tunnel amplifying the sound, the women came into view. I’d put them in their mid-to-late thirties, two or three years older than me, maybe. They were dressed up, drunk. The loudest voice was getting louder, rallying her friends to join her as they sang as one: today is where your book begins, the rest is still unwritten.

I couldn’t help but laugh as they unwittingly hammered the point of this piece home (hammered being the operative word). On the cusp of 2026, the year ahead is unwritten. I’m excited to write it, but not afraid to revise it, either. That’s how it gets good.

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If you want to know more about Ueland’s If You Want to Write, Susannah Felts wrote a great piece on Literary Hub about the reach of her work.

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