First Drafts

Even though last time I finished a novel the announcement post got over a hundred likes on Facebook, I’m ambivalent about admitting that I finished writing another one just last night. I can’t resist mentioning it, because it feels like I should have the right to brag after working on something for two and a half months (three and a half if you count planning) and writing 98,005 words (315 pages). But I’m scared that people won’t take me seriously as a writer if they hear how much I write, compared to how much I ever return to once I’ve got a first draft. The real work of writing, as I’ve heard repeated on an infinite loop in creative writing classes and workshops, is revising. In my life, I’ve written six full-length novels, only one of which has ever made it to a second draft. That’s not a great track record. It doesn’t help that, for at least half of them, I’ve considered burning the paper copies and wiping the files from my computer.

It takes no commitment to write a first draft, really. Sure, you need enough determination to stay focused on a few characters and keep them attached to something resembling a plot, but you never have to look back on a scene after you’ve written it. It’s probably best if you don’t, actually; looking back at something you just wrote is the writerly equivalent of looking down when crossing a canyon on a tightrope. What takes grit and skill is revisiting a scene you aren’t happy with over and over and over, until you either find the strength to destroy something you spent so much time on, or shape into being something better.

I’m honestly scared that I’m getting addicted to first drafts. It’s so fun in the moment to get to know a new cast of characters and explore the new world as it unfolds in your mind. I’ve started to notice physical differences in myself when I’m deep in a first draft, even. Running becomes easier and more fulfilling, because it’s a chance to meditate on what will happen next. I tend to avoid social engagements, because I need so much time to write, but when I do go, the conversations seem to have a poetic flow to them, and little moments that would slide by unnoticed otherwise all seem deeply meaningful. My dreams become more vivid. They’re often terrifying, but even when they’re nightmares, there’s a certain satisfaction in the way that the intense imagination that I’m pouring into my story carries over to my subconscious life. The writing itself is actually more like dreaming than I would like to admit. When I’m in the midst of it, it’s a burst of strange, overpowering emotion that puts the world in a whole new context. And when it’s over, it’s gone and forgotten, maybe forever. Gritting your teeth and reading through typos and plot holes in old work is hard, it’s so much easier to pick another bright, shining story idea and get working, to fall back into the pleasant rhythm of daily writing and let everything that came before fade away.

It’s tempting to get lost in this cycle of creation and abandonment from day to day, and tempting to get discouraged by it if I ever take the long view. But every writer has their own process, and maybe mine features a little less line-by-line edits and a little more writing from scratch. After all, my last two novels didn’t just come from nowhere; they were both adaptations of shorter pieces that I wrote years ago. They didn’t share a single line of prose with the originals, but that might be okay, so long as it works for me.

At any rate, I think that to improve as a writer I need to get over this knee-jerk evasion to anything I’ve already written, and I read an interview with Louise Erdrich recently that gave me an idea for how to get started with that. She claimed that she never has a master narrative in mind when she starts writing. Instead she writes bit-by-bit, sometimes prose and sometimes poetry, until she starts to see patterns between the fragments and weaves them into a story. Other times she takes completed stories that she doesn’t like and scraps them for individual short stories or transplants parts into longer works. I’m not sure that I could ever write an entire novel with that method, but I like her idea that old works still have value. All of the old stories that I thought were better off forgotten now seem more like my family’s basement: full of garbage, sure, but with some real value hidden deep inside it. That’s part of the reason why I won’t be doing archival Monday posts regularly anymore: my old writing suddenly seems a lot more precious than I thought when I started this blog, and I want to hold onto it.

As for the novel that I finished last night, I put the final draft and all my notes in an old shoebox, sealed it with duct tape, put a warning on the top telling me not to open it until December 2019, and put it in my closet in a place where I hope that I won’t notice it. It might seem like I’m falling back on bad old habits, putting it out of my mind for the next year, but sealing it away actually makes it feel like to a promise to myself that I’ll return to it, eventually. And then I’m going to make that damn story work, I swear.