Redrafting 1: Editing

Redrafting is where you get down to the nitty-gritty. Your first draft is only the raw material from which you are going to sculpt a thing of beauty and truth. In a sense, with a first draft you have assembled the resources from which you are going to build the finished item. You probably won’t need all these resources, and many of them won’t initially be up to the task they need to perform. As Tom Wolfe says, ‘You go to bed every night thinking that you’ve written the most brilliant passage ever done which somehow the next day you realise is sheer drivel.’1 But that’s okay. You can make the resources you’ve assembled better, and if you can’t, you can get rid of them and generate some new resources in their place.