Lia Declan's Musings

1. The First Draft

Finishing a first draft is an unparalleled moment of triumph. For a fleeting, delirious span, we feel unstoppable. We’re geniuses. We’re gods wandering around in the small universes we created. Our words flow across the page with effortless brilliance. Characters speak, plots resolve, and every sentence seems filled with insight. This feeling can last for ten minutes, or on particularly indulgent weekends, an entire seventy-two hours. We bask in it. We walk around our homes, imagining literary agents bowing at our doors, friends asking for autographs, the world bending slightly to accommodate our genius. And then we begin to edit.

Editing is the moment when the lights come on, and our illusions evaporate like morning mist. Editing exposes the inconvenient truth: we were never geniuses. We were caffeine-fueled amateurs with spotty attention spans and a penchant for ignoring basic grammar. Editing is the janitorial shift of writing. It’s where the romance of creation collides with the harsh reality of punctuation, continuity, and logic. It’s where we face the unvarnished truth: our first draft is ugly, messy, and sometimes incomprehensible even to ourselves. “What did I mean when I wrote that?”

2. Avoidance

We usually start the process with the ritual known as “letting the manuscript rest.” It sounds noble, thoughtful, even mature. In reality, it’s procrastination in a tuxedo. We avoid the file because we know what’s waiting for us inside. We know the manuscript isn’t the shining testament to our brilliance we once believed it to be. We know it’s a chaotic assemblage of plot holes, questionable character choices, and sentences that read like the results of a sleep-deprived game of Mad Libs. So instead of facing it, we clean our houses, reorganize our bookshelves by color, alphabetize our spices, and suddenly care about hobbies we had long abandoned. Baking sourdough and knitting a pouch for it becomes a legitimate form of professional development. Anything is preferable to confronting that document, except maybe relocating to a remote cabin and living as a hermit.

When we finally open the document, the first read-through begins. It’s a spiral of escalating horror. Plot holes that are wide enough to swallow small cars. Characters who had names suddenly acquire aliases or forget who they are. Dialogue that seemed witty at two in the morning now reads like a malfunctioning soap opera translation. We pause, take notes, make lists, and start questioning every life choice that led us to this point. Alpaca farming begins to look like a peaceful career option.

3. Killing Darlings and Digital Torture

Then we encounter the most dreaded piece of advice in the literary canon: “Kill your darlings.”

People repeat this phrase as though it’s sacred. It suggests surgical precision and emotional detachment. In practice, it’s the opposite. It’s a messy, emotional wrestling match with a single sentence we loved more than some distant relatives. The sentence is perfect, exquisite, and it illuminates the page. It also halts the plot for an entire paragraph describing the “subtle interplay of sunlight on a doorknob.” We argue with it. We relocate it. We try to justify its continued existence. Eventually, we delete it, and the act feels less like editing and more like betrayal. We mourn that sentence as we would a tiny part of our soul, and we continue.

Modern tools of digital torture only heighten the misery. Track Changes transforms our manuscript into a neon graveyard of every decision we regret. Every red squiggle is a scar. Every comment is a reminder that we once thought we knew what we were doing. “OMG, is it its or it’s?” We Google it again, even though we’ve Googled it twelve times before, but still don’t trust the answer. The Find function is merciless. It reveals that we’ve used “just” 847 times, “suddenly” on every page, and “smile” so often that human joy starts to feel like a design flaw. The manuscript becomes an ongoing record of our self-doubt. We open the file and feel like archaeologists examining the ruins of a civilization that once believed it had achieved greatness.

4. Beta Readers

At some point, we can’t trust ourselves anymore. This is when we turn to beta readers.

Beta readers are a strange breed. We hand over our flawed, barely coherent manuscripts and ask them to perform the impossible. We want them to be honest but gentle. We want them to spot every flaw while also telling us we’re brilliant. We want validation and critique simultaneously, which is a request that defies the laws of physics and human psychology. Their feedback arrives like a carefully calibrated emotional bomb. If it’s positive, we panic because they clearly missed all the errors. If it’s negative, we spiral into a full-blown impostor syndrome meltdown. No matter what, we feel like frauds, and yet, we keep asking for more. We are addicted to the emotional rollercoaster. This is part of our punishment for thinking writing would be glamorous.

The first full read-through is only the beginning. Editing continues through multiple passes, each with a new focus. First, we check the structure. We trace plot arcs, chase subplots, and attempt to untangle character relationships that have mutated in our absence. Then we focus on clarity, making sure the sentences actually communicate what we intend. Then we hunt for word repetition, awkward phrasing, and grammar sins we thought we had eradicated in previous passes. Each stage brings us face-to-face with a fresh wave of despair. We delete, rewrite, and move paragraphs like furniture in a room. We obsess over commas, semicolons, and whether the word “that” is necessary. We argue with ourselves about sentence flow like courtroom lawyers defending the indefensible.

5. The Discipline of Done

Somewhere in the middle of this process, we encounter emotional fatigue. Our once-beloved characters begin to irritate us. Our plot twists seem like embarrassingly obvious cliches. Our dialogue reads like a parody of our former selves. We wonder if the first draft was written by someone else entirely. We ask ourselves if this is worth it. We question every decision, every line, every scene. And yet, we keep going. Because somewhere beneath the frustration, beneath the shame, beneath the exhaustion, we know that editing is where the book becomes something worth reading. Editing is where the work transforms from a rough rock into a sculpture that can survive scrutiny.

Eventually, we reach a point where the manuscript is technically finished. Not perfect. Not flawless. Not ready to win awards or change the world. Just finished. This stage is less about pride and more about survival. We can’t face it again. We can’t read the first chapter without flinching. We’ve done everything humanly possible to improve it. We declare it done, not because it’s perfect, but because continuing would break us. And that’s okay, done is better than endless editing. Done is better than despair. Done is what allows us to move on to the next project, the next idea, the next manuscript we will inevitably adore and despise in equal measure.

Writers love talking about inspiration, the muse, the rush of the first draft. We romanticize it, we mythologize it, we tell stories about the divine process. But let’s be honest: the first draft is raw material. It’s the stone, and editing is the chisel. Editing is sitting in a chair, staring at every flaw, and refusing to let anything mediocre survive. Editing is not glamorous, it’s not inspiring, it’s sweat, tears, and coffee. It’s slow and sometimes excruciating, and yet, it’s the part that makes the work real. It’s the part that makes the book ours, and not just a hallucination we had one sleepless night.

We need to accept that editing is part of the journey, not a betrayal of the first draft. The rough pages we once loved are just that: rough. We refine, we polish, we discard, and sometimes we cry, but we persist. Because every sentence we fix, every paragraph we improve, every plot hole we plug is a victory. Every small correction is proof that we’re capable of doing the hard work that separates writing from simply having ideas. Every step is proof that the book exists as something others might one day read.

Editing is not a spark of inspiration. It’s persistence. It’s discipline. It’s showing up even when every instinct tells us to run away. It’s staring at our own mistakes and choosing to fix them, one sentence, one paragraph, one chapter at a time. It’s terrifying, it’s exhausting, and it’s necessary. And in the end, it’s the only real process that actually turns a writer into a writer. Without editing, we have a first draft, a dream, a messy confession of caffeine-fueled nights. With editing, we have a book, a real thing that exists in the world, flawed but alive, ready for readers who might love it, hate it, or just make us question every decision we’ve ever made. We are no longer gods. We are artisans. And the book is real. And that, unfortunately, is all the process we get.