23: Nitty Gritty on Rough Drafts and Client Expectations

Set your clients expectations before you give them the first draft If you’re a writer, you know rough drafts are just that: rough. They’re not meant to be polished and perfect. They’re going to have mistakes. But your clients most likely aren't writers, and they’re not going to know that. And when you hand them one thing and they’re expecting another, it has the potential to cause a problem. It’s our job as the professional guiding the process to set the stage. We don’t want the client thinking the rough draft is the final book, minus the official cover. I’m going to talk about the specific steps I take to manage clients’ expectations, but first I want to talk about the kinds of mistakes we have in those early drafts:   Mistakes in the writing There are mistakes in things like punctuation and grammar, transitions, even chunks of material that may need to be shifted to a different section. And that’s all okay, because now is not the time to be delivering a smooth, tightly-written draft. Editing happens later in the process, after the draft is written to completion. For one thing, if you’re still doing interviews, you’ll be getting new information about a subject or time period you’ve already covered in the draft. Nobody tells their story during the interviews in a completely chronological fashion—and that’s why they’re hiring us, to put the bits where they belong, so they don’t have to worry about how they’re telling the story, they can just go along with the flow of it. It doesn’t have to come out in any given order. But when you’re on interview five and they go more in depth into a story that they told you back in interview two, you’re going to go back and work that into the draft. If the writing is already tight and smooth and flawless, then it’s going to take you that much more time to sort of disassemble it, work the new material in, then polish it up again, with the proper transitions etc. So in the end, you’ll spend time un-doing and re-doing the work that you shouldn’t have done yet in the first place. These are the mistakes that will probably bother us as writers the most. But unless your client is a retired English teacher, they’re not going to be paying nearly as much attention to the prose as they are the content.   Mistakes in the content This brings me to the second big category: mistakes in names, places, dates, details of their life story. They know things that you’re just getting acquainted with, so you don’t have the “reading glasses” so to speak, to see them. You can create all the timelines and place lines and gather all the data in a super organized system, but mistakes will still crop up. Now, sometimes that’s because we misread something, or just got confused about something, but sometimes it’s because the storyteller has contradicted themself , or you find something in a source document that contradicts what they’ve said. I’m working with a client right now who didn’t find some new materials written by older members of his family until well into the process, and there was a bunch of stuff he told me that turns out to be flat out wrong. I never picked up that he was just speculating when he was talking about the earlier generations and he never told me he was doing it. And it’s all okay now, because he was ecstatic to find these memoirs written by the people about their own experiences. So mistakes will happen. And that’s perfectly acceptable—as long as you prepare your storyteller. How do you set the storyteller's expectations? Talk to them. For all mistakes that originate with the client, it’s really important to let them know that it’s natural and it happens to everyone. The one thing we want to avoid like the plague is to have them start self-censoring. We don’t want them getting hung up on whether their grandma was born in 1903 or 1906—those things can be verified, or just left out. And if they contradict themselves, even if the draft comes back and they tell us we got some...