Shitty First Drafts

I participated in my first writers' workshop when I was seventeen. My instructor shared a lot of quotes with us about writing, and whether we all agreed or disagreed with them, I've always remembered them -- but none as well as Hemingway's statement that "The first draft of anything is shit." It might not be the best philosophy for turning out work in a timely fashion, but for better or worse, my writing strategy pretty much depends on it.

I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the first long-form writing I ever did was for National Novel Writing Month. It's a challenge that actually encourages quantity over quality -- participants strive to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with good words counting no more than bad ones and everyone who hits 50k being considered a winner -- but does so with the underlying assumption that if you write enough, you're bound to write something good. I don't know if it works that way for everyone, having a steady daily wordcount and a group of supportive fellow writers always helps me tune out my "inner editor" and ultimately go places with my writing that I otherwise might not have.

In the past six years, I've written anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 words of fiction each November -- even continuing to work on one project sporadically until I finally typed "the end" at around 220,000 words. (For people not used to thinking in wordcounts, that's over twice the length of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and about four times as long as Fahrenheit 451.) None of these projects were particularly good. But as Ernest Hemingway and NaNoWriMo have taught me, "good" is not what first drafts are about. It doesn't matter that these first drafts were shit: three of these November novels have nonetheless shown enough promise for me to continue work on them after the month was up.

Writing with the belief that first drafts don't have to be fabulous makes the second draft a whole lot harder. But without this mentality the first draft would probably never be written. If I agonize over every word of something, I'll never make it to the end of the chapter, much less the novel -- but if I turn out a first draft in a month or two, falling for the characters and the concepts along the way, it doesn't matter how hard the second draft will be, because I'll have dedicated myself to doing it. It's easy to quit a story you haven't finished writing. It's a lot harder to walk away from a finished first draft.

I've been thinking about all of this lately because I'm in the process of working on a real, hard, not-so-shit second draft of the former NaNo-novel that ended up clocking in at around 220k. It's agonizingly slow going, and I've already started a Word document just to keep track of all of the research I need to do and decisions I need to make before I start to write the third draft (having decided they are not major enough to require my concern in the second). But sometimes I sit and look at my computer screen and marvel at the fact that there even is a second draft-in-progress. Today is one of those days.

You can laugh all you want at the fact that I spend my Novembers frantically churning out shitty first drafts of novels that there is a 50% chance I will never want to look at once the month is over. God knows I laugh at myself sometimes. But when I'm done laughing, I knuckle down and start writing -- and in the end, that's the only thing that matters.