First Drafts, and Other Musings

For weeks, a friend of mine has been stressing about her deadline for her next book. She mentioned that she felt she needed to finish the first draft by the end of the year to make certain she could turn the book before it’s due on July 1^st. I was startled. At most, it takes me a couple of months from the time I finish my first draft until I consider a manuscript finished. In one instance, I turned in the book three weeks after finishing the first version of the story. Clearly, my concept of a first draft is different than my friend’s.

Her first draft, as she would explain, is the skeleton of the book. It is only during the second draft that she puts flesh on the bones, adding scenes, characters, details and many pages. She deletes things, too. But mostly she is adding new content. Perhaps as much as twenty-five percent of her final word count is written after she finishes the first draft.

My process is completely different. My first draft is the whole story. It may be messy and have a few holes, but those are mostly minor things—names and descriptions. The main plot, the sub-plots, the characters, are all there. I seldom add scenes, just tweak what I’ve already written. But I do delete sentences and paragraphs. Lots of them. In fact, my final manuscript is often twenty percent shorter than my first draft. What I delete represents redundancies and scenes that don’t move the story forward. I write a dense first draft and then pare it down. The opposite process of “putting flesh on the bones”.

I wouldn’t know how to write a first draft that’s a skeleton of the story. If a scene isn’t complete and detailed, I can’t move forward from it. It has to feel alive and real or my creative mind gets stuck and I can’t figure out what happens next. Of course, I am a complete “pantser” (Or an intuitive writer, as I prefer to call it.) I often have only a vague idea of what will happen in my story when I start writing. It’s generally a romance, so that gives me a clear template of the kind of scenes and story arc I have to have. But beyond that, everything evolves as I write. If I try to plot ahead very far, my muse balks and nothing happens. It is only in the writing process that my story is revealed to me.

In terms of process, most writers probably fall somewhere between me and my friend. Although some are even more rigid in terms of plotting and spend months outlining their books and only weeks writing them. Other writers are even looser than me, writing scenes out of order and fitting them together only later. For all my vagueness about my story at the outset, I am a very linear writer, and almost never write scenes out of order. Sometimes I have little glimpses of what might lie ahead, but I don’t write them down.

My point in all this is that there are many, many ways to write a book and none of them is the right way. Except for you. The secret to writing success is finding the unique strategy that best unleashes your creativity. The balance between plotting and intuitive writing that makes you productive and happy. Although, no matter how well your process works, there will be rough, frustrating times. I’ve often have to discard large chunks of work during the first draft. I may throw out a third or even a half of what I’ve written because I realize I’ve gotten off track. Writers who plot ahead may also have an epiphany during their second draft and realize they have to rework a lot of the things they’ve already written. Both those experiences are frustrating and can shake a writer’s confidence.

I’ve known writers who tried very hard to change their writing style. Most often, it is intuitive writers who strive to be more disciplined and structured. They become determined to plot and outline more, believing it will make them more efficient. It may work for some. But most often, trying to change your writing process only results in the writer making different mistakes and having to do different kinds of revisions.

There is going to be some sort of unpleasant editing and paring down at some stage of writing a book. Words will have to be discarded. Scenes will have to reworked. Characters altered and sometimes added. Whether that difficult editing happens in the first pass or the second, doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the work of writing a book. Because, although some of it is magic, most of writing is work. Hard work. But knowledge and experience as to what makes the process easiest for you can allow you to be more productive and the writing to be as stress-free as possible.