Everything I wish I knew about First drafts when I started writing

Things I wish I knew about first drafts when I started writing.Unlike me, I’m sure most writers never have any trouble finishing a first draft. Okay, maybe a couple do.

I like to tinker, play, and revise to distraction. In fact, I sat on the opening three chapters of my first novel for about a hundred years.

Years, anyway. Quite a few of them.

Which brings me to today’s subject. First drafts. How do you go about writing them? What’s your best advice to a newbie on the subject?

I’ve found the best way for me is to rush through them – write every day until they’re done, and then take a break. NaNoWriMo is perfect for this.

So my advice: Get it on the page – it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is. You can fix it later.

Here’s some more great advice you might like to consider:

“Your first draft is your plan or outline. It’s much easier to take your ideas and characters out for a spin in the virtual world of an outline rather than manage hundreds of pages of a rough manuscript that may end up going nowhere.” Luke Mercieca

“Bad news is, it will suck because you’re not perfect. Good news is, you can make it better. Even better news is, that means you don’t have to worry about what you write. The first draft is for yourself and yourself only.” Era Metko

“The first draft of a manuscript lies in the midst of a great journey. What you do next will make all the difference.” Chantelle Griffin

“A large part of what goes into a first draft will not appear
in the finished work.” Giulio Zambon

“You will see things that need to change, how a different structure would enhance a scene or a chapter. Take notes, move on, and make those changes in revision.” Gerri Lynn Baxter

“Chapters 1, 2 & 3 are about to become Chapters 2, 3, 1 & 4. Oh yeah and you need to tear out most of them and re-write, because they’re bad.” Charles Murray

“In the middle of the draft, if it gets hard or boring or you feel like it’s the worst thing anyone’s ever written, that’s completely normal. Keep on writing anyway.” Kyra Halland

“You might end up rewriting 90 per cent of it, and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid of it.” L.K. Evans 

“Writing is like making a jigsaw puzzle without an image of the finished work, and the first draft is like working on the edges of the puzzle and on the parts you can easily recognise. Expecting to be able to write a first draft from the beginning to end is like attempting to solve a puzzle from top-left to bottom-right.” Giulio Zambon

“You’ll discover so much more about your world, characters, plot than you had planned.  And that’s okay.  Don’t try to force it into a box, even if you do have an outline.” Vanessa Maclellan

“Don’t get distracted by little details that you think you should fix – keep the momentum going and save your edits for later.” Drew Briney

“You can get port in goon-bags.” JW Arlock

“First Drafts are first drafts. It may only be a very small step on a very long journey especially if your intension is to write a series and its the first book. The first draft may be an experiment to see if the plot works or even an expedition to discover both the plot and the characters, and after a analysing it you might find yourself transplanting these elements into a decent story structure…” Mark Mercieca

“Don’t waste time trying to polish up a first draft.” Giulio Zambon

“You’ll get bogged down somewhere around the middle. Don’t give up. Push through, and finish it.” Keith Keffer

And there you have it. I think the general consensus is ‘just write it and worry about making it great later’.

What’s your advice?

If you liked this post, check out some of the other posts in the “Things I Wish I Knew About” series: Author PromotionPoint Of View, Critiquing, Dealing With Rejection, Editing Your Own Work, Short Stories, Creating Characters, Story DevelopmentWorldbuilding and Writing.

Meet Ian McHugh – Award-Winning Speculative Fiction Writer

Profile image of Ian McHugh deep in thought.
Ian McHugh

Ian generously moderated the CSFG novel critique group this year, offering invaluable advice to each participant. Here’s what he had to say about the experience and his writing.

Q: You began running the CSFG Novel Critique Group this year. As you have your own novel in development, how are you applying this experience to your work?

I think the big lessons I’ve taken from this year’s crit circle are (1) the importance of giving the novel good structural bones and (2) the importance of fully developing characters, including their motivations, pressure points, relationships and mannerisms.

While plotting hasn’t been a weakness of any of this year’s manuscripts in terms of plot holes or internal inconsistency, the need for plots to build tension and offer some surprises has been a recurrent theme.

Going hand-in-hand with this is the need for major characters to be both active and instrumental in confronting the problems of the plot, and for a sufficient level of sadism towards one’s characters – you have to hurt them because you love them.

Q: Your critiques suggest your core strength as a writer comes from your intuitive understanding of character. How does this affect the way you offer feedback, particularly in regard to conceptual-based (ideas/plot driven) stories?

Funny you should say that. I like to think that in my short stories I generally create distinctive characters who drive the story, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it my core strength.

In my first novel, I’ve found that I’ve struggled a bit to sustain that distinctiveness and roundedness across a larger cast of characters and staying with them for so much longer.

I’ve also tended to let my created world, in wanting it to be a character itself, overwhelm the human characters at times.

So I think, rather, that my focus on characters in critiques reflects the focus of my own struggles, rather than my strengths.

Q:Your credentials as a short story writer are well-established after winning the Writers of the Future Contest. What are/were your greatest challenges in writing a novel compared with a short story, and what would you do differently next time?

Sustaining the story for so much longer and over a broader canvas. Next time I’ll write – am writing – a shorter, simpler novel.

Q: Character is story, but story needs structure. How do you approach the structural needs of a novel-length story?

Haphazardly, at the first attempt, and with a rising sense of panic.

I’ve got a lot of value out of the structural stuff we’ve done in the CSFG novel writing group this year, for both long and short form stories – particularly understanding structural archetypes and having planning tools to map character wants/needs/actions/suffering to the story’s plot.

I think a couple of other factors are really important too: (1) knowing how much you can chew before you bite, and (2) having confidence in what you know about your story.

I didn’t do either of these first time through.

Q: Do you intend to run the novel critique group next year, and do you intend to submit your own novel? If so, what would you be looking to get out of it?

I think I’ll run it if I have a novel ready to submit for it – or at least am far enough progressed that I can finish the manuscript to a deadline next year.

If I put in a novel, then I’ll be hoping for some signposts to a better second draft.

I think the novel critiquing group is a really valuable part of what CSFG offers to its members so I think keeping that going is an end in itself. I was happy to support that this year without putting up a novel of my own.

That said, if I don’t have a novel ready next year, I’ll pass the baton and focus on my own writing.

Q: If you could give any advice to an aspiring novelist, what would it be?

I’d offer one piece of advice that I did follow and one that I failed to.

The first is: learn the art of storytelling by writing short stories first. Ray Bradbury said this, and I thoroughly agree.

I think short stories give a writer enormous scope to experiment with and learn how to handle different characters, worlds, plots and styles.

Stephen Dedman once said to me that you can learn 12 times as much if you write 12 short stories in a year as if you write one novel, and I think he’s right.

I think that even if a writer’s first novel is a success and easy to write, the next one or the one after that may not be.

If you’ve given yourself the best possible grounding in short stories first, you’ll have more tools available to write yourself out of trouble. (And also, you can use short stories as world-building and character-building tools for a novel idea, while at the same time creating a marketable product that will hopefully give you some sort of record of publication to mention to publishers once the novel is written.)

The second thing, that I failed to abide by, is: don’t underestimate how big a leap it is from short stories to novels.

While you’ll learn a lot from short stories, there’s still more to learn in taking the step up to writing novels. Learning what it is before you leap in can save a lot of heartache.

Ian McHugh is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop. His first success as a speculative fiction writer was winning the short story contest at the 2004 Australian national SF convention. Since then he has sold stories to professional and semi-pro magazines, webzines and anthologies in Australia and internationally. His stories have won grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest, been shortlisted four times at Australia’s Aurealis Awards (winning Best Fantasy Short Story in 2010) and appeared in the Locus annual Recommended Reading List. Links to most of Ian’s past publications can be found (free) on his website. His first short story collection, tentatively titled Angel Dust, will be published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2014.

Check out the Difinitive Rules of Magic which were ‘created’ at the Novel Writing Group in which Ian plays a huge part, or read some interviews from of the other Novel Critique Group members.

My writing plan for March

  1. Write at least 250 words a day on my Work In Progress novel: Welcome to Earth. I want to do this just to stay in the habit of continually writing something new, but it should add over 1500 words a week to the novel.
  2. Add more tension to the ending of Prophecy of Power: Werewolf, in preparation for the Angry Robot Open Submission 2012 period.
  3. Plan out/brainstorm ideas for the next two novels I want to write: A sci-fi set 200,000 years into the future, and a bodyswap story.
  4. Write a weekly blog about my progress (to keep myself honest!).

Find out more about writing.

Make a decision

Why is it so hard to complete a novel and get it on bookshelves?

It’s not really all that difficult if you stand back and look at it objectively.

  • You write, the word add up, and eventually there’s enough words to call it all a novel.
  • You rework it, get some feedback, fix it further, add a final coat of polish and send it away.

Its a process. Its simple. Repeat it often enough and you’ll eventually hit gold.

Why then do so many people get bogged down?

The fact is, it takes time – a sustained effort over a long period – to complete a novel, and then it takes a whole lot more time and effort to get it published.

Any sort of sustained effort is difficult because real life inevitably throws road blocks at you.

So how do you keep the enthusiasm up?

Make a decision.

“Yeah, I did that, but…”

No! Make a decision. A real decision! The kind of decision that goes like: “I’m going to do this no matter what!”. Not the “I’m going to write a novel” kind, because that’s giving yourself leeway to ‘always be writing a novel’. As Yoda says, “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

The moment you commit to it however, it becomes easy.

Real life stops throwing road blocks in your way because you can see them for what they really are: speed bumps. They may slow you down a bit, but they can’t stop you any more.

Once you’ve made the decision, there isn’t a speed bump out there big enough to stop you. You’re going to get a novel on the shelves no matter what!

The problem with editing…

The problem with spending hours editing a story is that at the end, you don’t really have much to show for it.

The word count might have changed a little, sentences and paragraphs irrevocably altered, even some chapters moved or removed, but from a distance it’s pretty much the same as it was before. The same story, at least – but hopefully better.

When you’re writing something new, there’s a growing word count you can point at and say ‘Ah-hah! That’s what I did today’. It adds up, too, swelling that sense of achievement.

With editing though – it’s malleable. Unless you’re making big, blatant changes, it can be really hard to tell the difference between the third and fourth layers of polish.

So, how do you get a sense of achievement, a clear indication you’re not on a never-ending treadmill?

Start with a plan. Work out what you want to do before you start, and stick to it.

First, review the story. Read it through, make notes, work out what you’re going to tackle and in what order, and decide how much you want to achieve each session.

Then, work your way through the story, stick to your plan, and at the end of it you’ll have edited the full draft.

Then, of course, repeat. Figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what could be better. Work out how to fix those things – and set to it, doing specifically that.

Repeat again as necessary, but try not to get into the habit of doing it over and over. Figure out exactly what you want to end up with, aim for it, and then get it out into the world when you’re done.

Game over. New project.

Redraft finished!

Been away from the my website, blog, facebook, and twitter for a while now – barely had time to check in. Been busily redrafting the novel – and I think I’m finally done.
Now I’ve just got to edit for considtency and other internal errors, then proofread/line edit. Following that, maybe find a friendly reader or two who’s interested in offering feedback and hopefully on to publication. 🙂
Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: