Refuse to Be Done

1. Embrace Rewriting as the Core of Novel Writing

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails: writing a successful book isn’t only making the most of the first burst of inspiration, as pleasurable as that is.

Revision is Key. Writing a novel is not just about the initial inspiration but the sustained effort of rewriting and revising. Good writing involves making a promising manuscript better, hour by hour, day by day, slowly but steadily moving it closer to your imagined ideal. This process is not merely correcting mistakes but transforming the work into something greater.

Three Drafts as Stages. The book organizes the writing process into three stages: the first draft (generative revision), the second draft (narrative revision), and the third draft (polishing revision). These drafts are not rigid steps but flexible stages where you might linger or return as needed. Each stage focuses on different aspects of the novel, from initial exploration to final polishing.

Adapt and Subvert. The advice in the book is not prescriptive but suggestive. It's okay if certain tactics don't work for you or feel at cross-purposes with the kind of novel you want to write. The aim is to help you become more yourself on the page and throughout your process. Discard what doesn't help or, better yet, subvert it.

2. Cultivate an Exploratory Mindset in the First Draft

Because what I’m trying to do in the first draft is to discover the book I’m writing by writing the book.

Exploratory Drafting. The first draft should be an exploratory draft, where you discover the story by writing it. This involves starting without a formal outline and allowing the story to emerge organically. This approach prioritizes discovery and surprise over strict adherence to a plan.

Embrace Chaos. In the earliest days of drafting, work in fragments of language and disconnected images, partial scenes and half conversations and unordered events. This chaos allows for unexpected connections and discoveries. Pay attention to inspiration filtering in from your daily life and from the books you’re reading and other media you’re consuming.

Trust the Process. Overplanning before beginning writing risks blocking opportunities for discovery and surprise. Rather than dutifully following an outline, be guided by what appears on the page as you write, by the emerging desires of characters and the dramatic demands of drafted scenes as well as by the acoustics of your sentences and the possibilities of the narrator’s voice.

3. Use Practical Tricks to Convince Yourself You're Writing a Novel

One thing to do from the very beginning of your draft, then, is to create stores of perseverance and confidence you can draw on whenever those doubts rear their heads.

Affirm Your Intention. Tell yourself you're writing a novel from the first day, stating your intention as a way of building and maintaining drive and perseverance in the face of doubt and other negative emotions. Remember that the task of any individual day is never to write a novel.

Working Title as a Guide. Attach a working title to your manuscript as soon as you can. This title will serve as a guide, reminding you of where you're heading as you inch forward through your sentences. It might also have a literal meaning plus a subtextual or symbolic one.

Enjoy the Trappings of a Book. Make your on-screen document look like a book by sticking a cover page at the beginning and inserting page numbers in the header or footer. Widen your page margins to make the page on the screen look more booklike and provide space for notes.

4. Overcome Writer's Block by Producing Inspiration

You should look at the material you produce to find your material . . . The story is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that are much savvier and more complex than you could have come up with on your own.

Writing the Islands. If you're unsure of what comes next, try "writing the islands": write the big scenes you already know, no matter how far off they seem. Once those scenes exist on the page, the task then becomes writing between these known destinations, creating bridges to connect these islands.

Follow Your Excitement. Paying attention to your material and to your desire and enthusiasm in any given moment will spare you a lot of frustration. Writing the islands also means getting the best stuff you have so far out of your head and onto the page, making room for new best stuff to arise.

Yes, And. Be responsive to the material on the page. You write a sentence; it asserts a new reality, one that’s surprising or strange, thrilling or off-putting. Then you read the sentence again, imagining the page is your improv partner, wanting to play, to create with you, if only you’ll be agreeable to its suggestion.

5. Develop Characters Through Action and Internal Stories

You need to know the story the characters are telling themselves, and then beyond that, you have to know the story your characters are telling themselves about the stories they tell themselves.

Character Names and Physical Traits. Ground the reader in your protagonist by using their notable physical traits. In the early going of the novel, such details can also suggest a fullness of character you haven’t yet earned on the page.

Keep Characters Acting. Make a rule to keep your unnamed, unknown protagonist active: write any scene you wanted, in whatever order, as long as your protagonist was doing something that caused a change to occur, in him or in the world around him. Write down what he noticed, which taught you what he remembered and showed you what he feared.

The Stories Characters Tell Themselves. Know the story the characters are telling themselves, and then beyond that, you have to know the story your characters are telling themselves about the stories they tell themselves. There is the story of the novel’s present action, but also the stories your protagonists are telling themselves about their motives and their pasts.

6. Revisit and Reuse Settings to Deepen Narrative Resonance

When your characters return to places they’ve already been, either they or the setting needs to have changed in the interim: A woman returns to her childhood home thirty years after she left, after having been a mother and a wife, finding the house disturbingly the same.

Reuse Settings. Rather than constantly inventing new locales, send your characters through the same settings again, whenever conditions have changed, which means whenever they have new knowledge, new problems, or new desires. See what those desires look like when the protagonist is brought back to the same spaces or is confronting the same characters again, characters who might also have changed in the interim.

Change the Conditions. When your characters return to places they’ve already been, either they or the setting needs to have changed in the interim. You change either the character or the setting, then recombine them again, so the element in motion can force its more kinetic energy on the element you’ve left at rest.

Create Newness. You cannot revisit your preserved childhood home as an adult without finding the rooms too small for the person you’ve become. You cannot enter your burning childhood home and escape unchanged. Either way, something new will occur next. How could it not?

7. Employ Generative Revision Tactics for the First Draft

If you find yourself stuck or bored or unable to figure out what to do next, experiment with a single scene that isn’t working as well as you’d like by rewriting it from another point of view.

New Points of View. If you find yourself stuck or bored or unable to figure out what to do next, experiment with a single scene that isn’t working as well as you’d like by rewriting it from another point of view. Even if you change it back later, it might help you see the work anew.

Change Up Your Storytelling Modes. Your book doesn’t have to be one continuous scroll of the same mode of storytelling. If what you’re doing stops working, don’t give up before you’ve tried proceeding in a new way. A detective novel could switch from narration to police notes or evidence write-ups or forensic reports.

The Circle of the Novel. Think about the favorite physical or textual elements of books you love and then add those elements to your novel as prompts for further writing. Adding anything you love to your manuscript is a way to make you love it more, and any manuscript you love is something you’ll want to spend more time working on.

8. Rewrite, Don't Revise: The Second Draft Transformation

Only when I finish the book can I go back to the beginning and write in the voice of all that happened.

Celebrate the Rough Draft. Take the time to celebrate. Let yourself linger in your accomplishment. Writing hundreds of pages of prose is an incredible feat all its own, and in those pages is, you hope, a first version of the story you wanted to tell, populated by meaningful events in the lives of characters you’ve come to know and truly care about.

Outlining the First Draft. It’s at this stage—and never before this stage—that I write a full outline of the novel, outlining what already exists. In this document, the goal is to try to capture the main story of the novel, by which I mean the action of the book’s prime timeline.

Rewrite the Novel. I retype my second draft from scratch, rewriting as I go, moving the book I’ve already drafted toward the one described by the outline I’ve spent the last weeks or months crafting. Don’t cut and paste to save time. Instead, retype everything.

9. Layered Revision: Refusing to Be Done in the Third Draft

What you want now is to stay inside your novel as long as possible, giving yourself every chance to transform this pretty good draft into a novel that’s as great as it can be.

Refuse to Be Done. Stay inside your novel as long as possible, giving yourself every chance to transform this pretty good draft into a novel that’s as great as it can be. The activities in this chapter will give you a way to stay in the work long enough to manifest yourself upon the page not once or twice but dozens or hundreds of times.

Layered Approach. Instead of tackling every problem area or opportunity in your manuscript simultaneously, break the work into smaller tasks meant to be done one at a time, one after another. This allows you to focus on specific aspects of the novel without being overwhelmed.

Daily Manifestations. As you fill your hours and days with the work of rewriting, your fictions will not be written by any one self but by the spectrum of selves we’re always becoming, even as the novel is becoming alongside us. These daily manifestations are what makes our favorite books seem written by superhumans.

10. Edit with Both Screen and Print for Fresh Perspectives

The mode of the screen is not reading line by line but skimming or scrolling—watch someone interact with Twitter or Instagram, or pay attention to your own eyes and hands as you read an article online.

Screen vs. Print. Revising and rewriting on paper will slow you down, keep you closer to the words. It won’t be the only way you edit, but it deserves to be a part of the process. The mode of the screen is skimming or scrolling, while print allows for line-by-line reading.

Read Aloud Often. Your ear will hear what your eyes won’t see. You have to read every word when you read aloud, something you don’t have to do when reading silently on the page or the screen, where you’ll naturally skim, especially as you get overused to your own prose.

Robot-Voiced Audiobook. Use the text-to-speech function on your computer to turn your document into a robot-voiced audiobook. If you want a brutal test of how well your prose is holding up, I promise that a tone-deaf robot with pronunciation issues will be happy to give you the least generous read possible.

11. Tighten Scenes by Cutting and Reorganizing

At this stage, you want to be sure your novel’s scenes are doing the plot work you need them to do: page after page, conflicts are introduced, resolutions are sought, complications arise and are dealt with, making way for new conflicts and new complications, and so on.

Manageable Chunks. Break the prose into smaller units. This way the goal isn’t to “perfect” the entire book, only this scene, this paragraph, this sentence. All my techniques for the third draft are means of doing this: what I want more than anything is to isolate one aspect of the novel at a time, thus making the day’s goal small enough to be achievable.

Cut Opening and Closing Paragraphs. Cut the opening paragraph. Cut the last paragraph. Do that for each scene. Now rewrite the ones that have to be there, let the rest die. This works well in part because it addresses one of the most common pieces of feedback given in writing workshops.

Camera Movement. Consider how the camera or the “eye” of the scene moves the reader through the visuals on offer: Does the description begin zoomed out and then move closer in? Does it progress in a way that makes it easy for the reader to imagine?

12. Refine Prose Style Through Targeted Edits

When I write—let things be known by their real names.

Work the Verbs. Scene by scene, look at the verbs you’ve chosen: Are they the best verbs, the most active, the most surprising? Or are they more pedestrian, everyday, overly mundane? Replacing even some of the most typical verbs with more precise and interesting ones will lift the level of your prose.

Diminish Thought Tags. One category of verb you might be able to dramatically reduce are those indicating that a character is thinking: I thought, he wondered, she understood, they knew. In first-person prose, we’re already inside the character’s speech and thoughts, so these tags are usually unnecessary.

Diminish Sensory Verbs. You can also get rid of many verbs used to indicate that a character is looking at something: I saw, I looked, I watched. Cut those verbs and describe the thing being seen. Where you wrote, “she looked at the approaching car,” try “the car approached,” and so on.

Last updated: February 24, 2025