This Is a Test
Why You Should Allow Yourself to Explore in the First Draft
The beginning is just the beginning.
I suppose some writers get ideas that translate to the page perfectly, and some find no gaps between the concept they have of their book before it is written and the reality of the book after it is written. Except I don’t know any of them. And I know a lot of writers.
The first draft can be so frustrating. You know what you want: a page-turner that also develops character, realistic situations that don’t get bogged down by unnecessary detail, a story that unfolds with no unnecessary information, and a dénouement that can’t be guessed from the start. The problem is, when you lay down those words on the page for the first time, they aren’t flawless. They don’t cooperate. They are unwieldy and shifty, clumsy and blunt.
EMBRACE THE FLAWS OF THE FIRST DRAFT
This American Life host and NPR luminary Ira Glass agrees. In an interview about creativity, he says:
What you’re making isn’t so good, okay? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. … But your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.
If you doubt that your work is any good, there’s a chance it could be great. Terrible writers, after all, never doubt themselves. That juxtaposition Glass talks about—between your taste, which is great, and your work, which isn’t necessarily great on the first try—is why revision exists.
LET YOURSELF GO WILD
Whether you plan your book with a fifty-page outline or wing it completely from beginning to end, a gap will exist between what you want and what you write. You might as well benefit from that gap. You might push the voice further than you have in the past, nail your characters to the wall instead of letting them off easy, or just write without editing for the first time in your life. The first draft is the time for experimentation.
You aren’t wedded to your first draft; you’re barely even dating. The first draft is really just the first step, where you begin to explore what your book might become. And as such, the best thing you can do with your first draft is take advantage of its shapelessness. Use it to go wild. That’s what first drafts are for.
ACCEPT THE GAP—AND MANAGE IT
So your first draft isn’t going to be everything you want it to be, but you want to do more than just tolerate this gap. How can you put it to use? Setting a secondary goal for the first draft—besides writing or finishing it—is a great idea to help ensure that the gap won’t be a vast chasm in every single way.
What should you spend most of your time and effort on?
I know people who hate to throw out any words they’ve written, so they agonize over the first draft word by word, sentence by sentence. This is a hard way to go. But if you write this way, my advice would be to write your first draft short and then build on it rather than writing everything that comes to mind and expecting to trim later. Then your gap is one you know how to deal with, instead of the thing you most fear.
If it’s important to you that your plot is watertight—certainly an essential quality for mysteries and thrillers, which tend to set up a lot of dominoes in the first two-thirds of the book before setting them loose in a torrent in the last third—then you may need to acknowledge that you’ll have a gap in your characters’ development and your sentence-level writing in that first draft. And that’s okay.
But in a way, the draft itself will highlight its strengths and weaknesses. This is where the exploration comes in. Write and write and then write some more, and accept what comes out in the first draft. It won’t be perfect, but it could be very illuminating.
LET THE BOOK FAIL
Sometimes, partway through a first draft, you realize that things aren’t working out. Odd as it may seem, failure is also success. It’s just like having your query rejected by an agent who wouldn’t have liked your novel; as painful as rejection is, a query has done its job if it gives the agent a true enough sense of the work that he can decide between “Hmm, I might like this” and “It isn’t for me.”
I started several novels before I finished one, and it wasn’t just because I didn’t have the discipline to stick with it. It was because not all my ideas were novel ideas—novellas, maybe, or long short stories. Some turned out to be plays. But it takes a certain type of idea, a certain plot and set of characters, to sustain interest—both your own and your readers’—for 80,000 or more words. You might not know whether an idea can be a book until you try to write it.
And if you have to abandon the project, well, you learned something in the process, so getting partway through a first draft and realizing that it isn’t a novel also counts as a success. Really! It’s not a waste. Every word you write helps you learn more about how to use words in the future.
Whether it’s your first book or your 101st (congratulations!), there’s a lot to be learned along the way.
FAQ
Is it normal to consider quitting on a story after drafting the first few chapters? What’s going on?
I have started at least five and, like many, chucked a completed one that was “meh.” As for short stories, I have close to one hundred that I couldn’t finish. —Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
I am so compulsive and struggle so much with getting words on paper that I only very rarely abandon a project. It takes me too much work to even get to fifty pages. I just sort of blunder my way through it. —Lisa Brackmann, author of Go-Between
It’s not only normal but healthy. I’ve quit writing probably five times the number of novels I’ve completed, and usually after just a few chapters. —Bruce Holsinger, author of The Invention of Fire
I have at least two books that have gotten to the fifty-page stage and then been abandoned. I always worry at that stage whether the book has legs. Ultimately that is where the hard work of the novel begins: getting from the setup to the payoff, which has been called the “saggy middle” for good reason. —Catherine McKenzie, author of Fractured
I’ve left many half-finished stories in the drawer, sometimes because I chose a story or character without sufficient legs. Often it’s that I’ve approached an emotional topic that I’m not ready to confront. And sometimes I chose something too facile and I recognized my laziness. —Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage
Pro Tip
Be willing to produce a lot of material that won’t make the final cut, whether in multiple drafts or a journal. Because here’s the thing: We writers don’t have so much as a block of marble or lump of clay or even paints with which to create. Writers are required to produce the material from which they will then craft the book. So recognize that your early drafts and story journaling are essentially creating the material, rather than writing the story you will be telling.
—Robin LaFevers
Pro Tip
There’s a danger in “writing pretty” too soon; it’s hard to unfrost a cake.
—Therese Walsh