About Second Draft

Elena Vasquez spent eleven years writing and rewriting her debut novel, The Copper House, before it finally found its shape. That decade of revision did not feel like failure at the time, she says. It felt like excavation. The book that came out on the other side bore almost no resemblance to the first draft, and that is exactly what she had hoped for.

After publishing two more novels and a collection of linked stories, Elena started noticing that the craft advice she had found most useful was almost never about getting words down. It was about tearing them apart and rebuilding. She launched Second Draft to fill that gap: a place to talk honestly about what revision actually involves, beyond the tidy workshop euphemisms.

She teaches fiction at a small liberal arts college and lives in Portland, Oregon, with too many notebooks and a deeply unreliable espresso machine.

Marcus Okafor wrote his first feature screenplay in three weeks and spent the next three years revising it into something he could show people. That ratio, he will tell you, turned out to be pretty typical. He has since written for television, worked in the writers room on two cable dramas, and sold three original pilots, only one of which made it to air.

The gap between a first draft and a shooting script, Marcus argues, is where real writing happens. Structure that seemed airtight falls apart. Dialogue that read as sharp turns out to be actors doing the heavy lifting. Characters reveal themselves to be thinner than you thought. He finds that process genuinely exciting, and he wanted to make a show about it.

When he is not writing or recording, Marcus works as a script consultant and revision coach for both emerging screenwriters and novelists making the jump to screen adaptation. He is based in Los Angeles and is, by his own admission, constitutionally incapable of leaving a first draft alone.