The first draft of anything is shit
-Ernest Hemingway

If you've ever talked to me about writing or emailed me about writing or hung out in the forums, you know that I throw around that quote like I get five dollars every time I say it.

The more I write and the more I read other people's writing, the more I've come to understand that good writing is nothing more than ruthless editing. You've got to be your own harshest critic, you have to see all the flaws that other people are going to forgive you for and fix them.

And you need a good group of people who are willing to take the time to give you honest, well thought out feedback. While you'll catch mistakes that others will forgive you for, you'll also miss glaring holes in your own work. In a first draft, the story in your head is often radically different from what's on paper. It's hard to see that because what's in your head fills in the gaps when you read the story you've written down.

This happens to everyone. I've been writing and work shopping for two years now and it still happens to me. I'll present a story and someone will invariably say, "I don't understand why this character did that" and I'll think it's obvious. It's only obvious because I know they character, I've thought about the character, I've walked around with the character in my head. What I didn't do is a good job of transferring who that character is onto the page. A first draft is just meant to get you to the point where people can tell you what they don't understanding in your work. Then you can go back and start fixing it.

That's not to say that you never get better at it. After two years I'm starting to understand where my weaknesses are. I can look at my own work and ask myself "Well, I've made the same mistake in every story I've written for the last two years, am I making it here?" But that kind of thing can only come from experience.

I know there will someone out there who cites some writer who can write one draft and its perfect and never needs a revision. You're not that writer. If you're reading this sentence, you are not that writer. Your writing needs revision and if my experience in workshop and as an editor has taught me anything, your writing needs revision badly, desperately, urgently, frantically.

I can say this because I was there, when I thought my own first drafts were magical brilliance that flowed from my fingertips. This was before I saw the flaws in my own writing. Nothing drove this lesson home like doing NaNoWriMo. There was one night probably ~25k words into what I was working on that year when I actually sat on my couch with a few drinks in me and thought that I was some sort of savant. I was so in love with those ~25k words that I honestly thought that I would come to the end of the month, write "The End" after the last word and be done, ready to send it off to publishers. I couldn't for the life of me understand why it took people years to write a novel. I was writing one in a month. And not only was I writing it in a month but it was good. I was a god. There was no question I would make it as a writer if I could write a novel in a month and have it be perfect in one take.

As you can imagine, what I actually churned out that November was far from brilliant. In fact, it's so nauseatingly bad that I can't stand to read it and no matter how long and hard I think about it, there's no way to save it. Revision isn't enough, it needs a complete rewrite.

It was a good lesson though and I keep it on my hard drive so that every time I see the NaNoWriMo folder, it knocks me down a peg. It reminds me how much work I still have to put into whatever project I'm working on.

The reason I write all this out is that I've finally come to the end of the story I'm working on. Gone are the halcyon days of simply opening the word document, scrolling to the bottom and churning out a thousand or two thousand words. Now the real work starts. I get to spend my time reading what I've written and fixing every mistake I can find, from the biggest plot holes to the smallest typos. Then I get to step back and ask myself the tough question of "what have I done here that I'm not seeing? What mistakes have I made in the past and am I making them here?" Then I try to fix those problems and after all that, after I've fixed everything I can find and I've checked myself for past mistakes, only then do I have a first draft worth sending out for comments.

Word count at the end of major combat operations ~29.7

Posted by Ben Corman at 12:02 PM

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