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.

Narrative Nit-Picking

I will read almost anything. Yes, it's true that when left to my own devices I gravitate toward 19th-century English novels and/or young adult fiction and/or stuff with magic/wizards/aliens/spaceships, but I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to fiction. I spent a lot of my youth being frustrated by people around me who judged my favorite books by their genre, so I try my best not to repeat the behavior, and if someone I trust recommends a book to read, I will read it. I may not like it, but I'll certainly give it a try.

And yet there are some stylistic tics that bother me, across all genres. I realized this about two and a half years ago, when on the recommendation of several friends, I picked up The Time Traveler's Wife. It should have been right up my alley: urban fantasy (not that it packaged itself as such, but it was) mixed with a love story. I should have connected with it. Instead, I found myself turned off by three stylistic choices:

1. Narration in the first-person present tense

2. Multiple first-person narrators

3. Chapters beginning with the name of the present narrator

For whatever reason, these three things combined to create a style that kept me from liking the novel. Since then, I've only read one novel that makes the same three choices (Old Magic by Marianne Curley, which I read on vacation when I had run out of other books in a non-English-speaking country), but I've read many more that meet one or two of these criteria -- especially #1.

So why do these things bother me?? Is it just because I've been conditioned to believe that the first person should be an exclusive perspective, or that novels should be written in the past tense? Why is it that first person and present tense narration don't bother me when used separately, but feel so inelegant in combination?

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say part of it is about the conditioning. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of present-tense novels I've read, and they are by and large very recent productions (excluding portions of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, because including it would just open up a whole new can of worms). Same goes for novels with multiple first-person narrators -- although these have been more prevalent in the literary canon, with Wilkie Collins infamously producing novels like The Moonstone out of a series of stitched-together witness accounts.

But part of it may go deeper than that. How often do you find yourself thinking or speaking about yourself in the present tense? Not the present progressive -- "I'm doing this, I'm going here" -- but the present -- "I do this, I go here"? Maybe this is just me, but I don't go around narrating my life to myself as it happens. So when a character in a book starts, effectively, to do just that, it sounds strange because it's not a mode of speech I'm used to.

In contrast, first-person past tense isn't as strange. We're all used to relating stories of what we've done after-the-fact. We're incredibly familiar with third-person past-tense, as it is, essentially, the narrative mode of gossip: "He did this, they went there, and she wore that hideous dress." I'm not sure how third-person present-tense narration fits into all of this (and to the best of my knowledge I've never read any long-form works in this style), but for whatever reason, "He walks across the room" is easier in my head than "I walk across the room."

Still, this isn't to say that good works of fiction can't be written in the first-person present-tense. I flew through Holly Black's White Cat despite its use of this exact style, and now that I'm halfway through the sequel, Red Glove, I hardly even notice the narration as strange. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, though not as much to my taste as the Curseworkers novels have proven to be so far, also uses the same style and is no less worth reading because of it.

Maybe I've realized that it's stupid to dislike books specifically for their style of narration. Or maybe I've just read enough of this style, now, to be conditioned out of seeing it as anything out of the ordinary.

Age Appropriate? What We Do--and Don't--Tell Kids to Read

I'm sure everyone and his mother has opinions about the age appropriateness of certain books, and that the large community of YA readers, writers, reviewers, and their mothers have more opinions than most. Until recently, I was pretty sure I didn't have opinions like that. My parents never really monitored my reading when I was growing up, though we always did talk about it, and I loved nothing more than doing just that. I read a lot, even as a kid, devouring pretty much all the fiction I could get my hands on -- most of it found while browsing my school or public library, or the local bookstore.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation -- and as someone whose love of fantasy was rekindled by those books -- I grew up at the forefront of some of the biggest debates about age suitability and parents controlling what their kids read, and all of it struck me as incredibly strange. I distinctly remember being very puzzled as to why one of my friends, to whom I was incredibly grateful for introducing me to the Chronicles of Narnia, wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. (Him: They have witches and wizards! Me: So does C. S. Lewis. And the White Witch is scarier than Voldemort. Him: But the Chronicles of Narnia are Christian books! Me: Have you noticed they always celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts?) Aside from the fact that telling the average kid not to do something is the best way to ensure he does just that (something J. K. Rowling thoroughly understands -- look at what happens in Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge tries to ban the Quibbler), telling kids not to read things just never made sense to me.

But now that I am slightly older, with two younger cousins coming to me for reading recommendations, I'm realizing that there's another side to parental control of reading -- not just what grown-ups forbid, but what they never recommend.

Over the past week, I've read two young adult novels -- Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood, first published in 1982, and Holly Black's White Cat, first published in 2010 -- and although they're very different novels, they got me thinking again about the question of content and age suitability.

Dragon's Blood takes place on a desert planet where one of the main businesses (and pastimes) is training dragons to fight each other. The planet's economy depends upon a system of indentured servitude, with people trying to earn enough coins to fill their bags and buy free of their debts. The story follows fifteen-year-old Jakkin as he attempts to do just this by stealing a dragon egg and raising the hatchling to become a fighter. By all rights I should recommend this book to my cousin -- what teenage boy, or girl for that matter, doesn't like reading about dragons? -- but I'm not sure I will. While male indentured servants tend to fill their bags by working in dragon hatcheries, as Jakkin does, most of the (male) characters in the novel seem to think that the only way for female indentured servants to do the same is to work at brothels -- which are so connected to these indebted women that they are known as "baggeries," where women work to fill their bags. On the one hand, it's probably realistic that a kid who works at a middle-of-nowhere dragon hatchery wouldn't have encountered or heard stories of other jobs for indentured women. And on the world that Yolen has set up, it might be that there aren't many. But I'm not exactly sure this is the kind of book I want my young male cousin to be reading.

White Cat, aside from possessing a teenaged male protagonist, is a very different story. Seventeen-year-old Cassel lives in a world remarkably like this one, except for the fact that he comes from a family of curse workers, whose (technically illegal) powers let them do everything from changing people's luck to manipulating emotions to breaking bones, all with the touch of an ungloved hand. Cassel's the only one in the family who isn't a "worker," but it doesn't keep him from getting all tied up in his elder brothers' mafia connections or having to deal with the fact that his mom's in jail for using her abilities. The result is that he feels way older than the average seventeen-year-old, and in some ways the book seems "older," too -- to the point that some reviewers have complained that it is far too violent to be a young adult read. In White Cat, people beat people up, lie and cheat and steal, break into houses, and take orders from organized crime syndicates without any of this seeming particularly out-of-the-ordinary. At moments it is unabashedly violent. And yet my gut response is that I'd be more likely to recommend it to my cousin than Dragon's Blood, and not just because it's a better novel. For some reason, I don't feel the need to shelter him from violence the way I feel like I should be directing him away from even oblique (but pervasive) references to sex slavery.

Thinking further about this comparison, it's not like White Cat contains glowing female role models. In fact, I don't think I particularly like any of the female characters, at least not yet, largely because the ones who could possibly be likable feel underdeveloped in comparison to Cassel and his brothers (though I haven't read the sequel yet, and Red Glove could very well change this). But this doesn't change my gut feeling about the difference between these two novels. Maybe it's just because I feel more of a connection with Cassel's homework headaches and coffee consumption and family drama than I do with Jakkin's hard labor and boyish crushes, whereas my younger cousin -- still in junior high -- might have the reverse experience? Or maybe it's because mainstream media is clogged with sex and violence, desensitizing me to the impact of murder and corruption even in what is, ostensibly, a book for children? Or maybe I'm just crazy, and should never be allowed to recommend books to anyone under the age of eighteen.

All I really know is this: only some kids are like me, wandering libraries and bookstores in their free time, browsing book catalogs and standing on tip-toe to check out the books on the family bookshelves. Most kids only read what people suggest they should. And this makes me wonder, is there a point where not suggesting a book is just as bad as telling a kid not to read it in the first place?

Read These Books: Something Like a Top 5 List

A few months ago, something I can no longer remember prompted me to attempt to make a list of my fifteen favorite books. The list got to about twelve, but trying to figure out the last three was hell -- every time I thought of one book that deserved to be added, another three or four equally deserving titles came to mind, and while the list did still have room for some of them, it most definitely did not have room for all of them.

I was reminded of this list by a recent New York Times article where staffers shared lists of their top five favorite novels. I skimmed down their picks, noting that perhaps predictably, the only crossovers between their lists and mine fell in the field of nineteenth-century British novels (specifically ones by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot). I'm fairly certain no one listed a novel published before Sense and Sensibility, and most of the picks fell within what I like to think of as the margin of literary respectability -- they're all the kinds of books that it would be acceptable for NYT staffers to publicly admit to loving.

What follows is something like my list: more than five (but less than fifteen) books that keep me coming back for more (ordered by publication date, because picking out the best books is hard enough without having to decide exactly how they measure up to each other as well).

Paradise Lost by John Milton. One of the few books I fell in love with in a classroom, and largely because of the classroom -- but then again, I'm not sure there's any other way I would have willingly read a seventeenth-century epic rewriting of the book of Genesis. I could babble on about how he makes use of key poetic devices like chiasmus and enjambment, but you don't have to understand literary terminology to realize that his language, though difficult, is beautiful, and deserves to be read one word at a time. (Also, where else are you going to find a description of angels having sex in iambic pentameter?)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Michael Cunningham, in an essay on Mrs. Dalloway, says, "Everybody who reads has a first book -- maybe not the first book you read, but the first book that shows you what literature can be. Like a first kiss. As you read other books, you kiss other people, but especially for those who are romantically inclined, that first book stays with you." When I first came across this quote, I knew I had finally discovered a way to explain what Pride and Prejudice meant to me. When I read it for the first time, at the age of fifteen, I had no idea that it would propel me forward through an English honors thesis at Berkeley and into a graduate program at Columbia -- but it most certainly has.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Another good candidate for my "first book" that I keep coming back to because, while it has its issues both in terms of writing quality and underlying ideology, Jane is a protagonist whose emotional journey I can believe in and gather some kind of personal strength from. It's a book that I have grown up with, and that allows me to mark my growth each time I read it (which seems to happen about once a year, whether I intend it or not).

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. In addition to being one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language, Eliot is remarkable for the way she dangles potentially bright futures in front of her protagonists and her readers only to snatch them away and replace them with everyday monotony. Even more remarkable is her ability to make me loathe the way this particular novel ends, while simultaneously forcing me to evaluate the source of my loathing -- my personal adherence to some of the same conventions that her work persistently critiques. But if all that sounds too depressingly academic, do not despair: what really kept me reading this novel was the inimitable spirit of its protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, who I would compare to a combination of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre if she weren't so thoroughly herself.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Yes, this is a bit of a jump in time, but a lot of 20th-century literature just doesn't float my boat. Bradbury's classic has been co-opted into the "literature" section of the bookstores, but it will always hold a place in my heart as one of the first novels that showed me exactly what futuristic fiction could do. I've posted before about why you should read this book, and I stand by all of it.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. This novel does what science fiction does best: it makes you think, not just about aliens and the future and advanced technology, but about humanity in the present. And it does that gently, unobtrusively, by giving you one hell of a compelling story. Genly Ai, a human, is sent to the planet Gethen to make contact with its unique local population. Gethenians are all effectively genderless 95% of the time, and when they do take on sex characteristics for the purpose of intercourse, they can become either "male" or "female" -- so that someone who has fathered a child might easily mother another. Though it's often classified as a feminist novel, I feel it's less about trying to imagine a world without gender and more about getting to the heart of the binaries that tend to shape our own way of thinking by positing an environment in which many of these could be deconstructed.

Possession by A. S. Byatt. I debated a while over whether to add this book to my list, because while it is many things, it is not perfect -- but it's perfect for me. It's a novel that parallels the research of two modern scholars of Victorian poetry with the secret romance between the two (fictional) poets they study. It's an incredibly heterogeneous text, combining standard third-person narration, academic articles, fragments of poetry, and the poets' lost letters to create a sprawling meditation on the relationship between literature and love.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda. This would be the novel that first kindled my interest in alien characters and probably put the "aliens" in the title of this blog! I've written elsewhere that it reads very much like a first novel, with all the uncertainties and issues of pacing that one might expect, but even knowing its flaws, I can't help being in love with it. Told from the first-person perspective of a humanoid alien woman struggling to defeat the amnesia that left her with no way of knowing why she's being chased through the galaxy, at first glance it may seem to be no more than an unappealing collection of sci-fi tropes. But at least in my opinion, Czerneda gets that you're allowed to deal with the tropes as long as you infuse them with heart, and her characters -- human and alien alike -- come alive because of this. It's a beautiful way of thinking about what it might mean to see humanity through alien eyes.

The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane. I love everything that Diane Duane writes, but when forced to pick a single book of hers that I love the most, this one always wins. In fact, when silly people force me to pick just one favorite book, this is usually the book that I pick. Yes, it is a book about teenage wizards -- but before that scares you off, it's also a book that deals with the kinds of problems that wizardry can't solve, or maybe could solve but shouldn't. It's about finding hope in the midst of grief and love that defies pain, and all the other things that make me love Duane's Young Wizards series to begin with.

I would list the runners-up that didn't make it onto the list, whether because I've only read them once, haven't actually finished reading them, haven't read them in a while, or already had listed a better book by the same author...but if I did that, the list would probably triple, and besides, that's not really the point.

So, if you were making a list of five (or ten, or fifteen) favorite books, what would be on it?