This was revelatory when I heard it. Damn near poetic. I wanted to put it in fortune cookies immediately. It spoke like absolute truth to my soul.
That this advice came from a working screenwriter, who had a legitimate career of his own, gave it even more weight.
For most writers, there is nothing more painful than writing a passage that doesn’t sing. There are a couple of reasons for this, but it boils down to arrogance and stupidity.
There’s a certain arrogance that comes from possessing a talent that other people don’t have, particularly if it is one that they envy. “You’ve written a book? I always wanted to write a book. How awesome! You’re awesome.” And though you may shake your head and say, “Oh, no,” humbly like you’re supposed to, inside you have to admit there’s a part of you going, “You know what? I am kind of awesome.”
To do what other people don’t or can’t do means you stand out. You’re special.
As such, you’re expected to be special. All. The. Time.
And you are special. It's a rare gift to possess a talent that speaks to other people. But, truth be told, you’ll be great, at least as great as you want to be, only some of the time. Not every song is a hit. Not every book tops the NY Times. Not every movie is a blockbuster.
No matter how special we think we might be, we all flirt with mediocrity on a regular basis. This may be why it scares us so bad.
When we read something that we’ve written, and it’s good, truly, really, undeniably good, we know it. There’s a rush that goes along with it. Like you’re in line with the universe and every good gift it has to offer. You almost have to stop for a second and revel in the magic of it all. There are times I’ve written a line or a scene, and I’m so amazed and humbled it came from my fingers that I need to walk away from it for a second just to hold onto that feeling. It’s too good to wreck with all the feelings of inadequacy that will invariably come a passage or two later, when I’m once again struggling to find the words that say what I want them to say.
And it’s stupid to feel this way. It’s useless, pointless and stupid to fight those moments of inadequacy. Only by powering through them will we reach the next great passage.
The romantic notion is that truly great writers get that truly great feeling all of the time. Obviously, right? That's why they're great.
That is not the reality, however.
Let’s go back to Harper Lee, whose career was built and sustained on one book alone, one that just so happened to win a Pulitzer. Because her career revolved around one beautiful, important, award-winning book, we have this idea that she hand-picked her brilliant words like daisies, arranging them ever so deliberately and thoughtfully in a vase that she presented to a lucky publisher, who clearly must have snatched it up and published it right away because clearly, clearly, this book was something special.
I mean, it had to be, right? She had taken a year to write the thing, relying on the generosity of her friends to pay her bills so that she could concentrate solely on her writing. Her first draft certainly had to be killer as a result, right? I mean she did it the way we’re all told it should be done. Focus. Dedicate yourself to the process. Respect it. Respect yourself.
Take. The. Time. Get it right.
Then and only then will you have something great.
If you dare to produce mediocrity, then that’s where you deserve to wallow, you shameless hack.
Eh, not so fast. When Harper Lee presented the first draft of this book to a publisher, it was considered a good start, but not publication-ready. The editor felt it was more a “series of anecdotes” rather than a novel. That means it was considered special because of its potential, not necessarily its content, though she took a whole year to get it right. Lee went on record saying she “deplored” American fiction for its lack of craftsmanship. This is a writer who believed strongly in preserving the love of language, and likely spent arduous hours, days and months to make her first draft the strongest she could before she submitted it.
She may indeed have picked every single word carefully, but it still wasn’t good enough to do what this book ultimately ended up doing. If you don’t believe me, then you can simply read “Go Set a Watchman,” which was essentially the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
This was essentially the novel they spent two years plucking and refining to get it into the shape TKAM is today, turning a group of charming ideas into an actual story. If you read them back to back, you get an idea of where an idea becomes an actual book, because you will have two drafts to compare to each other.
One won the Pulitzer. One didn’t. I’ll let you figure out which was which.
In other words, the “craftsmanship” didn’t depend solely on her first draft, which showed promise, but it wasn’t completely realized, no matter how much time she had spent to get it right.
Simply put, she didn’t.
Thankfully for her, it wasn’t carved in stone. It could be manipulated, like clay, until all the imperfections were addressed. Then, and only then, was it in fighting shape to literally mold her destiny based on the strength of one book.
No matter how hard it is sometimes to pull those words out of your keister, nothing that we ever write is written in stone.
Unless, of course, you’re chiseling in stone tablets, in which case – you do your own thing. This chapter won’t apply to you.
For the rest of us, the process is a little more flexible. And thank God. Otherwise none of us would have ever read “To Kill a Mockingbird” at all. But we wouldn’t have TKAM if it weren’t for “Go Set a Watchman,” which, as a first draft, wasn’t fit for publication. Though imperfect, it still had value. If she hadn’t have written it, she wouldn’t have sent it in. If she hadn’t sent it in, no one would have seen the potential of what she had set out to do, or got behind her and helped her do it.
It’s irrational to fear your first draft being imperfect. You might as well fear the sun rising every morning. Your first draft will be fraught with imperfections that will need to be addressed if you want to publish it. Even a blog post… even a Facebook comment… all these things we writers put out into the word generally go through a thorough screening process.
That’s what it means to honor the craft and love the language. A writer who doesn’t take pride in what she writes, even in the smallest, most casual context shows the world that she doesn’t give a crap about the stuff she peddles on the open market.
Your rep starts and ends with what you publish.
This is why I obsessively self-edit even the smallest responses, which can even include text messages if I’m honest. I’m one of those word snobs that will not text you back if you send me text shorthand. The only way I’ll forgive changing “you” to “u” or “to/two/too” to “2” or for to “4” is if your name is Prince.
Even when I had to use flip phones and cycled through each number to get the letter I needed to spell it out correctly, that’s exactly what I did, which was why I didn’t text that much.
I don’t text much now because autocorrect is my arch nemesis. I type fast, as you can tell, so I’ll craft a quick text and I often don’t do a second read through until my finger has already hit send, where I’ll spot that autocorrect fail with a sinking gut, instantly shamed that anything I might have written when out in the world with known errors.
If I know another person is going to read what I write, I am a tad neurotic about getting it right.
The only real exception to this rule is when I instant message my best friend. We’ve been instant messaging each other every single night since the 1990s, and while I will go out of my way to correct errors before I hit send, my best friend simply doesn’t care. He knows what I mean when I talk, yet I still want to present my best work, even in casual conversation.
I’ve gotten better, but I’m still fairly neurotic.
As a result, I fiercely protect first drafts. Those drafts are for me and no one else. No one reads them, not even my beta readers. Hell, I don’t even read them. I write and move on, write and move on, until I cross the finish line. I don’t worry about the second draft until I’m completely done with the first. As such, I give myself permission to do whatever I want with Draft 1. When we get to the chapter on editing, much later, when we’re ready for it, I’ll finally release an example of a first draft, and then I’ll edit it and show you how I correct it into something I feel more comfortable publishing.
For the purposes of this experiment, what you’ve been reading are the second or third drafts, depending on how much time I have to spend on it and how obsessive I want to be that day.
They’re still not perfect, though. Because of this, these second and third drafts that you’re reading will undergo a few more editing passes before I would ever think to publish them in a book. The reason for this is the same brand protection I mentioned above. You develop your reputation with everything you put out into the world, whether it be a blog post, a Facebook comment or even a 140-character tweet.
Nothing ruins your rep faster than publishing something before it’s ready.
A first draft is not ready.
Say it with me: A first draft is not ready.
One more time with feeling: A FIRST DRAFT IS NOT READY.
Got it?
Good.
It’s okay to be imperfect because it’s inevitable. Freaking out about it is a total waste of time. You’ll never be perfect, not without some help, and this is not the time you need to worry about perfection anyway. You have one job and one job only: finish a first draft.
Which…?
(Say it with me kids: A FIRST DRAFT IS NOT READY FOR PUBLICATION.)
I seriously think we need a jingle complete with a bouncy ball to reinforce this. Someone get on that.
Okay. So. Harper Lee wasn’t perfect out of the gate. Stephen King, the prolific, bestselling, iconic master of horror himself, likewise threw away the first few pages of his novel, “Carrie,” which his wife had to fish out of the garbage and insist that he finish. He decided to do so because he didn’t have any other ideas to work on at the time. He took what started as a short story, to prove that he could write a female character, and expanded it into a novel.
Though it was his fourth to write, it was his first to publish. I’m 100% sure it went through rigorous editing as a result. That first draft, which he nearly abandoned himself, was not the book you can buy at a bookstore today, which, (sorry Stephen,) is one of his weakest works.
(A weak Stephen King book is still a pretty good book, proving, once again, perfection is overrated.)
He never would have been “Stephen King” had he not forced himself to work through the imperfections and just get it written.
Thus a career was born.
Are you starting to see, now, the value of finishing an imperfect work?
You will note that I tend to overwrite, and much of that I’m leaving intact for the moment, even if I’m going to delete a lot of it later, once I get a clearer idea of the exact message I want to get across in each chapter, and how it fits into the overall book.
The only reason I’m showing you this much is to show you what it takes to get from Word 1 to Word 50,000 and beyond. You do it by writing one word at a time, even if it’s less than perfect. The fact that none of the chapters are perfect is kind of the point of the experiment.
None of this is written in stone. I can fix whatever problems there are later, in the editing process.
Like I’m supposed to.
The first draft is your chance to get to know your story and fall truly in love with it. The second draft and beyond is to cut it down with a fine-edged sword to do it justice.
Write now. Fix later. Even if it’s a clunky passage you only write to bridge one scene to another, just because you’re not exactly sure how to piece it all together yet, you can delete what doesn’t work for you later on.
“Delete.” It’s both the scariest and most liberating word for any writer in the 21st century. It’s scary because you know that you will inevitably be faced with chopping your poor little darlings to bits, and nothing hurts worse than finely crafting a sentence only to realize you don’t even need it when it’s all said and done.
It’s liberating because you are now free to explore whatever ideas you want to, even though not all of them will serve you.
And they won’t. Get used to that now. Not every brilliant piece of dialog needs to be spoken. Not every single idea needs to be expressed. Not every single sub-plot needs to be explored. And worse… not every single book you write will meet the muster for publication, certainly not in the beginning. If you let that stop you, you’ll never be a published writer. Real writers find a reason to write, not an excuse to quit.
If you can quit, you should, because this life is not built for those who aren’t willing to give it their all and go for broke every single time they sit at a computer. If you’re afraid of writing poorly, you’ll never develop the skills to become great. Confidence and competency come by doing.
Power through that first draft. Get something concrete in your hands. Then give it to someone who knows more than you do about writing and let them show you where things that fell flat, or didn’t connect, or failed to land. As you fix these problems, you learn what to do, what not to do, what to keep and what not to keep. This will make you stronger. This will make you better.
This is a step in the right direction, not your only chance to scale the Grand Canyon. You may one day, soaring through the sky boosted by the rocket on your back powered by a bestselling book or a Pulitzer award. But you’re not going to get there unless you’re willing to get through that first draft.
If it’s still crap at the end, it’s not the end of the world. You can always start over from scratch. Out of 32 books written, I’ve done four page-one rewrites, which means I started the whole thing over from scratch. I wasn’t just tweaking and revising. I discarded everything because I knew that it would never do the story justice as it was.
For those keeping score, three of those page-one rewrites were my first three books.
For a new writer especially, it seems unthinkable that you could write pages and pages and pages and pages – and then throw it all away. We toil and fret so hard over each and every word that it’s often physically painful to file 13 any of it.
When we were younger, my best friend Jeff told me that a well-known author (I want to say Sidney Sheldon) was notorious for writing pages and pages and pages only to throw them all away the day after he wrote them.
I found this incomprehensible. He threw them away?? How is that even possible? I have a plastic tub FULL of things that I have written over the years, kept in the very shape I created them, on notebook paper or anything else I could fill with words. I even have poetry written on the backs of Burger King paper tray liners. As any writer will tell you, the Muse is not a conscientious guest. She’ll show up when she damn well feels like it, whether you’re ready or not.
I’d jot down verses as they came to me, even if it was when I worked a double shift at a restaurant. I kept every single remnant. Each word was a part of me.
And you want me to throw them away?
Are you MAD, man?
I keep everything, even if it’s a first draft on my computer. You can’t have them. They’re mine. I gave birth to them and I love each and every one, even if I can never read them again because I’ll cringe into a full-body cramp.
There’s a reason why all those embryonic ideas are sitting in a big plastic bin in my closet, or tucked away never to be found on my computer. The first draft of anything is a starting point of greatness, not greatness itself.
This is true even if you feel great as you write it. Writing is very cathartic. You have ideas rambling around in your head all the time. Putting them on paper is a bit of a release of sorts. There is often a rush that occurs as a result. That’s why new writers are so excited about a premature draft to the point that they’ll send it out, as is, to seek representation. (Or publish it without benefit of running it past a whole new set of eyes to catch any errors.)
Since I’ve done the former, I avoid like hell the latter.
A first draft can be good enough to show potential, but it’s a hint of that potential only. If you want to sell what you write, you need to make peace with the idea that every single thing written must be revised. Every. Single. Thing. Even your pretty, precious baby will face the cold red death of the editor’s pen. It has to. If you want your writing to cut like a sword, you have to be willing to forge it in fire.
Writing the first draft is just the first step of this process.
Truth be told, this is the most liberating place you could be.
The act of creation allows you carte blanche to tell your story your way. It is allowed to be clunky. It is forgiven for being imperfect. It’s the seed of your idea, not the complete harvest. In the creation process, you can say, “Screw the rules!” and write whatever you want to write. If you want to stick a purple hippo doing the merengue in the middle of your story, who’s to stop you? This is your playground. You can do whatever you want.
Now is not the time to worry about the agents or publication, or movie rights, or book signings. You don’t even have to worry about the edit. Just open up your work in progress (WIP) and let her rip. Do your thing. Tell the story in a way that you thoroughly understand it. Say every single thing you want to say.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to keep three out of every ten. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a couple of tasty little morsels of brilliance somewhere along the buffet.
You won’t know which is which until you get it written.
This is not the time to worry about perfection. This is not the time to fret over every single word as if it is chiseled out of stone, delivered right from the hand of God himself. If you craft every sentence in such a way, it’s no wonder it takes months and years to complete a draft.
“Well, Ginger, that’s how you produce quality content.”
OR…
You could write knowing that every single word is tenuously placed, a mere suggestion that may or may not make it to the final draft, and that’s okay. Stephen King is a writer same as you. The only reason he doesn’t let “writer’s block” stop him from clocking in his word requirements every day is because he doesn’t let the fear of imperfect writing block him.
To get through your set writing goals per day, you’re going to have to make peace with the idea you’re going to write some clunkers, some stinkers, and a lot of stuff that will fall on the floor in the editing process.
It happens to Every. Single. Thing. Everything. Whether it’s a movie or a book or a freaking greeting card, every single thing you write for consumption will be revised.
I already mentioned my time spent as a freelancer, where I produced quite a bit of content over short periods of time for a paycheck. These all went through the editing process. Most of the time, I didn’t get anything back. I’d say roughly 85% of my content went on to publication without my seeing it again.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t edited, tweaked or revised. It just means that the editor didn’t need my input on what needed to be changed. Whether it was a typo or correcting a sentence or getting rid of unnecessary words, anything that didn’t require my rubber stamp to make the change was changed for me, and then released to the public.
Was I simply more careful with 85% of my content, picking and choosing every single word and magically finding the combination that fit? No. I wrote every single article with the same focus and care. Some editors may have been pickier than others, granted. A lot of the editing process boils down to that one person’s perception of the content. As you can tell from reader reviews, no one reads the same content, even if they see all the words in exactly the same order.
The editing process is a filter, to whittle away what doesn’t serve the content, to make the statement more concise and accessible. An outside source, who doesn’t know where your story is going, who needs to understand what is going on from only the material presented, rather than your intent, will be able to spot where it fails on both of those fronts. That’s what editing does. It makes what you intend to say what you do say, where everyone else can understand it.
Its function is different from the act of creation because it has to be. It takes something that has that spark of potential and polishes it, refines it, makes it pretty, makes it strong.
The editing process turns that potential of greatness into a reality.
This is not your job right now. That is not your focus right now. You can’t ice a cake unless it has been baked. No one can edit what isn’t on the page. Even if you have to throw away ten pages December 1, write five pages today. It doesn’t matter if they’re crappy. It doesn’t matter if they’re imperfect. With every word you write, your story, your characters and your message comes more fully into focus.
Here’s the best news of all. These imperfections are where you learn. My husband always says, “If nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong, how will you know?” You’ll learn what you did that was wrong and you’ll learn what to do to fix it, and these are the skills you need to acquire. The more skilled you are, the easier it is to sink the basket on the first throw. The more experience you have, the stronger and better your content will be.
It will still never be completely perfect, but the rewrite/editing work you do on the back end won’t be as monumental as the creation process that’s ahead of you now.*
Creation is hard, which is why 80% of Nanowrimoers usually abandon their projects. Writing a book, one little ol’ word at a time, is daunting, even if you’ve done it before. I have 32 books under my belt, yet the first 20,000 – 30,000 words of any new project I write are always the hardest. It’s an uphill climb no matter how experienced you are.
But if you’ve done your job properly, setting up a plot and characters that will sustain themselves organically towards your ultimate destination, it’ll be a whole lot easier (and more fun) to swoop down that first drop and loop through the rest of your roller coaster, carried along by your own momentum. And if it’s not perfect, who cares? The first draft is not who you are as a writer. It’s a part of who you’re going to be.
So take some of the pressure off yourself, Moses. Put down your chisel. It’s not time for that yet. It’s time for you play around in the sandbox for a while. If your castles aren’t perfect, don’t worry. You can “start over” again all the way up until you hit publish, and it’s a virtual certainty that you will.
Don’t get it right.
Get it written.
Your time starts… now.
*I’m going to show you the “first draft” of that paragraph above, just because the irony is too delicious. Enjoy:
Started First Draft: November 8, 2015 12:47pm PST
Completed First draft: November 8, 2015 3:05pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,528
Completed revisions: November 8, 2015 4:04pm PST
Updated WC: 4,361/30,363
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