I didn’t work on my new novel during the first six months of the year, but I was hyper-aware of it glowering in my Dropbox waiting to show me what a horrible writer I was. I did almost anything else, a short story, a book review, ran an advertising campaign, wrote copy for a website, pondered A.I., cleaned my house badly and mowed the property over and over until the temperature cooled and the grass ceased to grow. It was classic avoidance. I didn’t want to open it and see the results of that rampant, uncontrolled first draft.
Hemingway, Lamott and King advise getting comfortable with a ‘shitty first draft’. I get it. Constant writing and rewriting for me has been a disaster. My novelist mind and my internal critic cancel each other out, and, like a snake devouring its own tail, I’d end with less words at the end of a session than I had to began with.
I think its because constructing a novel is immensely complex, the world-building, the characters, the pacing, the conflicts, right down to the techniques of word usage and grammar. It’s nightmarish to take it all on at once, so it makes sense to tackle the most important bit first, the story. It’s what readers crave. It drives their fiction reading and it’s an fizzer when it’s absent. Leaving the rest for another draft is sage advice. However, it doesn’t address the abyss it creates and the resultant fear and despair which accompanies writing a bad first draft.
For the first six months of the year I was beset with questions. Can a story be massaged out of it? Was it worth the bother even in its shittiest first draft form? Maybe I should become a carpenter? And the reason I didn’t pour a stiff whiskey and open the file? I simply couldn’t face it. It was my longest procrastination stint to date, one for my personal Guinness Records. What finally got me reading in the end? I’d run out short story ideas, the grass had stopped growing, the windows were still a smeary mess, but I was content with that. There was nothing left for me to do that was more pressing than reading my first draft. So I did.
And guess what? It wasn’t that bad. I could see the story. I’d need to rewrite the ending of course, because I missed my own point, but I liked my main character, and as he was my narrator, that was a big win. It was messy. Diabolical in some places. I’d changed one of my character’s names from Cat to Aimee with the find/replace function, so all words with ‘cat’ in them, like ‘catch’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘category’, became things like ‘Aimeech’, ‘Aimeeastrophe’ etc. However, I had something to work on.
Such was my relief that it was almost, but not quite, worth the worry in the first place. I danced. I sang. I peered through my smeary windows at my brutally mowed paddocks with a whiskey in hand and forgot about my thoughts of becoming a carpenter. Suddenly, I was back on track.
The lesson learned was a simple one. No matter what state of the first draft, there will be something to redeem and that’s all I need in the end. And committing to write a shitty first draft means I need to gird my loins to look through the awkward and the ugly to what lies beneath. Let’s look for good bones. Then sift and polish and sift and polish, one draft at a time, until it isn’t shitty anymore.
PROMISE TO SELF: The second draft is to fix any holes I have in my story, firm up characters’ motivations, complete character and story arcs, and take out the fanciful side-trips which muddy up the story. It’s terrifically difficult, perhaps the most difficult draft of all, but that’s all I’m allowing myself on this second pass. Leave the Cat/Aimee issues, don’t rewrite the same sentence over and over in hope of reaching enlightenment. Just put on the blinkers and get on with it. Give it a backbone from which to hang all the other elements which go into crafting a meaningful novel. And most importantly: NO FURTHER CRISES OF CONFIDENCE ALLOWED. Yeah, I know. That last one is shaky at best.