I loved Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. If you’re working on a novel, especially if you have a really messy draft of a novel you don’t know what to do with, you need this book. I found so many things worthwhile that my copy’s full of purple underlines. I’m at a bit of a loss on what to share, because there’s so much of value here. What’s great about this book is that it’s for everyone. I think both seasoned and new writers will find something of use here. This book is full of things to try, things to practice, usable things to move you forward no matter where you are in your novel writing process. 

The book is split into three sections, one for each novel draft. The first section is the largest, followed by the third, and the second. And each section is split into wee chapters that jump all over the place. That might not sound like a great thing, but because each wee chapter focuses on one thing that gives the writer some seed they can go plant, it works. The format also makes it easy to digest. The book is slim at 151 pages, but it contains some of the most usable and fresh suggestions I’ve seen in a recent craft book. I will absolutely return to this book again and again as I write.

It feels like Bell took all the wisdom on crafting novels that he’s collected and polished over the years and gave us nothing but the shiny gems. It didn’t feel like there was any filler in this book, which was such a quiet joy as I read. There’s no sifting. No humdrum bits to get through. I found something to appreciate in all three sections, especially the first two. If you want to write a novel but find the task daunting, I really believe this book will help you get to a submittable draft.

Here’s an example from the First Draft:

“In her essay, ‘The Circle of the Novel,’ Jane Smiley talks about twelve kinds of discourse the novel might contain: travel, history, biography, the tale, the joke, gossip, diaries and letters, confessions, polemics, essays, the epic, and romance. Smiley argues that while almost every novel include the biographical—’the sense that the reader comes to understand a character completely, better than the character understands himself or herself’—most great novels make use of a number of these forms at once.

“Look at the material you’ve produced so far: Which of Smiley’s discourses do you see already in play? Which could be added to introduce new kinds of narrative and textual variety? Write local legends between chapters. Think about the structures of jokes. Compose letters or emails from your characters. Consider the historical and social constructs your characters live inside and how those might drive or complicate what’s on the page. If your book contains a travel narrative, it might be interesting to think what essayistic questions your character’s trip could ask along the way. Test our what might fit and look for ways to create new generative energy to keep yourself writing. Think especially about what you’ve been trying to put into your novel that you haven’t been able to make work so far. Could using a different discourse be the way to bring that material in?”

I loved this idea, and it’s reflective of the kind of useful creative ideas you’ll find in Bell’s book.


The Second Draft gives you actual steps to revise your messy first draft. I thought the second section, although the smallest, was the most helpful. Bell suggests you take your first draft and create a complete outline of your story in its current form. Do this however you want, but make sure you get down all the book’s events.

Side note: I’ve always used Scrivener, but I’m doing my best to be off screens as much as possible and give my growing fountain pen collection more love, so I’m working through Bell’s process using index cards. I know a lot of writers who swear by index cards, but I never felt drawn to use them until recently. Right now I’m following Bell’s advice and creating an existing outline using index cards for an older novel I wrote that has promise but is a super messy NaNoWriMo discovery draft. I might share how that process goes in time. It’s a slow thing.

After you create your existing outline, you can then work on the outline of your story to identify plot holes, character arcs that don’t pan out, and unresolved subplots to restructure and craft a story that readers will love.


By revising the outline first instead of the novel, you’re giving yourself a bird’s-eye view of your story and saving yourself a lot of time. If you’re a discovery writer—writers who don’t pre-plot or outline their stories much before they write—this will likely be your first look at your novel from this perspective, which makes this process ideal for discovery writers. I’ll be trying to convince discovery writers I work with to use this revision process. It just makes sense.

Once you’ve drafted a new outline for your novel, which is no small task and shouldn’t be rushed, then you’re ready to rewrite your novel. Yep, rewrite the entire thing, sentence by sentence. I mean, it sucks, but dammit, he’s right.

Here’s what Bell says:

“The trick of the second draft is to recapture or re-create the magic that inspired the novel in the first place, but to do so with the fullness of the style you developed by the time you reached the end. More than anything else, committing to this process will divorce you from the sentences you wrote while you were figuring out what your novel was, making way for new prose written with a fuller understanding of who your characters are, of what their story is, and of how the story might best be shaped.”

Bell warns against cheating by cutting and pasting,

“…don’t cut and paste, if you can avoid it; you’ll find it unbearable to retype a bad sentence, but you won’t be as hard on anything you copy.”

Side note: I do think this advice is likely more useful for discovery writers than it is for people who are heavy plotters and spend months drafting robust outlines before they start writing. I don’t write that way, but I need to believe that those poor bastards get to bypass something in the revision process.

Bell recommends using two monitors, or a tablet and a monitor, with your first draft on one screen and your second draft on the other, redlining any text in the first draft that you transfer and rewrite into the second draft. 

Bell says,

“As you rewrite, you’ll inevitably improve the prose, making slightly different choices as you rewrite, and retyping the whole novel makes it much easier to make the necessary changes at the level of plot and character. In this way, the first draft becomes what I call a diminishing draft. One day, the diminishing draft will be depleted down to nothing, while your second draft will have grown from a blank document into the better novel you planned in your revised narrative outline.”

The Third Draft section is just as solid as the first two. I know I already said this, but there really isn’t any filler in this book. There’s so much excellent editorial advice in this last section. 

Some Third Draft wisdom:

“As you read, highlight any passages where even at this late stage you feel yourself being genuinely moved—by which I mean simply anywhere you feel some kind of emotional, intellectual, moral, or aesthetic jolt, that feeling we get when we’re reading a good book for the first time.”

Bell suggests basking in those glorious moments and then analyzing them to find out why they work so well, sorting out where they are aren’t, and noting if there are chapters in your story where you might want to add them.

I’ve only shared a few of Bell’s gems, but this book is a miner’s dream. If you write novels, I hope you’ll do yourself a favor and GO READ THIS BOOK. It’s such a small time commitment and such an excellent resource.

You can grab a copy here: Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, or borrow one from your local library.

That’s it for now. I’m almost finished with the next craft book I’ve been reading, Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison, and it’s been a delight.