What do I do with a first draft?

Children (and parents) are in a race to publish.
You have a story ready?
Publish it.
In fact, one of the most common questions I get before children sign up for my writing programmes is, Will the children publish books at the end of the course?
(The answer, by the way, is “no.”)

At least once a week, I get an email from someone asking me to read their child’s brand-new book. Parents ask for blurbs, reviews, and “just a little time” from authors all the time. I’ve also lost count of the number of self-published books I’ve received as gifts.

It doesn’t end here.
Schools tie up with publishers to release dozens of books each year.
Some schools have even made it compulsory for every child to publish a book! It feels like the whole process of writing is becoming more of a farce, with AI writing more stories than we can count, and children racing to publish twelve books before they turn twelve.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to invite someone to talk about the importance of editing, and how rigorous the process must be. Importantly, I wanted someone to address the idea of editing our own work before we attempt to put it out there and share it with professional editors.

And that’s why I invited Aparna Kapur, editor at Duckbill Books, to conduct our thirty-seventh guest session for us.

Not for one moment did her session disappoint. From reading like a writer to editing down to the sentence-level and word-level, she took us through the process of editing our own work, no matter how difficult it is. I loved how she broke it down for us, working on plot, character, narrative arc, structure, point of view and detail. While I would have loved for the session to be longer, the hour we spent together was a wonderfully intense one. I hope every participant who attended went away feeling like the editing process, though daunting, is rewarding!

Finally, a participant asked, “What do we do when editing feels like too much work?”
Aparna’s response: “Remind yourself of why you wrote in the first place. You get just one chance to tell your story; let it be the best you can make it.”