Lessons From the First Draft
What I Wish I Had Understood Before Starting a Novel
For nearly eleven years now, I have told myself that I will complete The Roots of Mnemosyne1, at some point. While it is nowhere near complete, I told myself I would take the time to reflect after each draft. The first draft is done2. An 84,000 word monstrosity involving contradictory timelines, unclear motivations, cringy dialogue, unsatisfying arcs, clumsy reveals, terrible pacing, shifting geography, and about a million other problems that were startlingly easy to see, but hard to fix as I was writing.
This whole process has taught me so much. It has the potential to spiral into a rant about self-discovery, commonplace books, motivation, inspiration, community, and about a million other things, but I wanted to share a few here. The thoughts I keep coming back to. In hopes that it might keep someone else from making at least one of the mistakes I did.
Writing starts with wanting to tell a story. Nothing else.
I grew up hearing about authors who had a single movement of whole casts of characters spring to life, and suddenly a story needs to be told. The problem with that narrative is people can end up expecting it. Waiting for that first seed of the full story to suddenly appear before the writing can begin.
The truth, at least for most, is probably less satisfying. Most writers start out with the wish to write a book. Because they love fantasy worlds. Because writing has given them fulfillment in other ways. Because they have something to say that matters. But I don’t think anyone has a sudden epiphany of how everything fits together, where the story starts and where it all ends.
In other words, I think the act of deciding to tell a story is the first, most important part of this process. It will likely precede stagnant time where you will have bits and pieces that you are struggling to assemble.
The issue is, even after deciding early in life that writing a novel was on the horizon, it always kind of stayed there. I went through years of that, wondering if the piece that would make it all work would ever come to me.
Near the beginning of undergrad, having made almost no progress, I made the decision that I needed to start writing regularly now or I never would. Now was the time. These few weeks were agonizing, filled with words that never felt right on paper and knowing that I couldn’t share a world with others that I couldn’t even see myself.
But the urgency to be a writer now did what I think happens to everyone. An idea came to me walking home one day, about how the world should work. It came from merging a line from the book Just Mercy with a few conversations with friends of friends, and behold, the concept of the three metatapisi3 worlds was born. There was no beginning-to-end narrative structure, just an interesting idea to explore. But at last, I had a foothold. I think this is when the story really began.
The internal decision that you are going to tell a story someday shapes what you pay attention to. Everything you encounter from then on becomes a potential puzzle piece to integrate into the world. But I think it only works when there is some sense of urgency. Not “I want to write a novel someday” but “I am a writer”. I wasted years waiting to understand something-the fictional world-that the process of writing, itself, teaches you.
You need to make the decision for it to be a work in progress, not a work in the future. And that is going to mean some level of agonizing commitment, at least for awhile, that feels slow, pointless, and unproductive, like trying to populate an empty world with stick figures. But eventually, something will click.
Telling things in order is for essays.
I’ve been told most of my life that the way to write a story is to just keep writing what happens next. After spending a solid chunk of the last couple months trying to teach myself how to write a novel, I actually disagree, especially in the early stages of a project.
Because writing feels less about what happens next, and more about what you want to find out next. The goal should be answering the unanswered questions that you, the writer, are trying to understand about the world you create. And usually, each of those questions requires research, plotting, aimless hikes, and maybe a little internal screaming. When you answer that question, you write it down4 and move on to the next one until your world stops feeling like a toddler duct-taped pictures from magazines together.
When I first told myself it was time to sit down and write the fantasy novel I had in the back of my mind for years, I only had the ending planned. The world was empty, the characters populating it were vague and indistinct, and I didn’t know where to begin. So I followed the advice, and just tried to start writing. It fizzled quickly because the world was empty. It wasn’t any more real to me than it was to anyone reading the words that vaguely described “a forest”.
I didn’t know that the only way to make a fictional world less empty was to just keep asking yourself questions about it.
Not that I would have known back then, which questions to ask. Much less how long each one would take to answer. It gets easier to ask questions the farther along you get. The things about the world its writer does not understand grow more complicated and less generic the longer this process continues. Stumbling across a plot hole exposes your inconsistent logic and the process of filling it raises more questions.
And then, you solve the next one.
In other words, this speech may be as applicable to writing as it is to escaping Mars.
There is a point at which this strategy becomes much less helpful, but in the beginning, knowing that I was looking for answers to questions no sane person would ask would have saved so much time.
If you don’t resemble your characters now, you will.
I started out writing characters, guarding intensely against giving any of them any interests or patterns or arcs that resemble my own. But there are two issues with this. The first is that you can only write what you know. Creating distance between the dynamics of your characters and people you know, trying to make sure you write things into the mouths of protagonists that run against anything you would ever say, trying to make sure their passions are as distant from yours as you can make them. It typically won’t work, and if it does, it just means inherently that you are writing further away from what you cared to say. Don’t write yourself, but writing is always going to be deeply personal. You have something you want to write for a reason. Even worse than trying to avoid making characters share any traits with yourself is trying to avoid any parallels with people you know. Listen, you have to get character quirks from somewhere, and your own life is one of the few things not subject to copyright. No one else has access to it. If you ignore this incredibly useful store of information, you are just going to end up rewriting Lord of the Rings. Instead of doing this, try to think of obscure people who you don’t interact with anymore. Chances are, the character of them in your mind is largely a fabrication anyway. But even doing this, I think many people are always going to be a little uncomfortable when a character’s voice begins to resemble their own (even if their beliefs do not) or when a snippet of conversation or conflict you experienced makes it into the draft. But I think the fear of this was disproportionate when taking into account what writing is.
I’m not saying to make a character a self insert. I’m saying it’s pointless to try and outrun the feeling of referentiality, because writing is an active role, filled with research and deciding which rabbit holes to explore. And you do not remain unchanged throughout the process of trying to build a person from scratch.
When I began writing one of my characters, I wrote down their interests. I thought it would be interesting to make one of the characters communicate through the Victorian Language of Flowers. I spent a long time researching it, trying to develop ideas for how it could be used in the story and develop some familiarity so I didn’t introduce unintentional meanings. And guess what? Now half my friends know me as the person who talks in the Victorian Language of Flowers.
That’s what happens when you create traits for a character. The research you do and the time you spend writing in their voice affects you.
So embrace it. It’s going to happen either way.
Writing is like fumbling through a pitch-dark house, finding corners by feel. But nothing compares to that feeling of finally finding a light switch.
Anne Lamott once said you only have to be able to see two or three feet in front of you. There was a time when I needed to hear that to know that I didn’t need all the answers to the story before writing.
Now, I’m not so sure I agree. I think what you need to know before writing is much more complicated for many people.
I think some know the feeling they are trying to create without being able to see those three feet in front of them, as long as they know the direction they are traveling.
To me, writing feels more like stumbling through a dark house and tripping over random stuff on the floor that needs to be cleaned up, without you knowing what it is. You know that the house needs these rooms when it’s complete, it needs a bedroom and a bathroom and hallways. You know the colors everything is supposed to be, and you may know that the living room has a painting of a crocus on the wall that’s broken in half. But you don’t know where the chairs are or where the doorway leads, you only know the feeling it gives you.
For the life of things, you don’t know where on earth those light switches are either. Every once in a while your hand will hit one, and you’ll see a huge part of the story fall into place. It might not be right, but you can paint the walls and rearrange the furniture later. Now you know what you are working with, even if most of the time you are just running your hand along the walls in the dark, one shuffling step at a time, writing dialogue that sounds dry and generic, fishing for details you know will come to the surface eventually.
Before your second draft, learn from Marie Kondo
Believe it or not, I’m not talking about getting rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy, that, at least for me, is a recipe for deleting tens of thousands of words. No, I mean I was mentally unprepared for how little I know about my own work. The whole idea of tidying up your stuff is taking everything out of drawers and hidden spaces that you have not interacted with recently; with things you probably forgot you put in there.
There’s so much in a story that you forget was shoved into a closet. Motivations that don’t make sense in the story’s larger context, visual details that spark the wrong emotion for that scene, motifs that you realize were written for a different character.
This feeling is so much like the one of slowly digging through the back of my closet, finding old papers and art supplies in the wrong bins, forgotten cards from loved ones and sweaters that need repair before they can be worn again. A high word count might not mean everything is good, but chances are, there are pieces worth rescuing, if only you can find the location to which they belong.
Don’t write a time travel story that will collapse under its own weight on the first try. Worlds collapsing should remain events in your story, not a description of your writing process.
Just wanted to add this in. It’s not based on a real example.
Sometimes, you must allow yourself to start over.
There is an orange folder somewhere with the terrible first attempt by a ten year old that will never see the light of day. There is another draft in my google drive from high school, somehow equally terrible. And each word I added only made me dislike it more. The latter sat there forever, because advice given to new writers lays out the cardinal sin: never start over.
I ended up starting over, and it’s the only reason I’ve gotten this far. By realizing the others were false starts, I was able to finally see what it needed to be.
There is hope in this process. Each step has made the story feel a little more “right”. Even if it feels painfully slow, progress, aggravatingly, tends to behave that way. Trust yourself to know when starting over is the right choice. You know more than any instruction book when that is.
Writing Involves a Certain Amount of Self-Deception
You have to tell yourself it is going to be a good first draft, while holding the knowledge in your mind that it won’t be, because telling yourself that you are writing junk as a beginner makes it feel like progress will never happen. It will.
It does get easier. Writing starts with wanting to tell a story, but it ends with having a story you need to tell.
I don’t think developing a fictional world is ever over, and I still don’t know everything my characters will get up to. But, finally, after laying out this outline, the world and the story have started to feel weird to me. This step feels different than previous ones somehow. I am writing the story for other people now, because I finally understand what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to describe a world that now feels real to me, in the same way others’ work does.
And that’s a milestone that gave me a bigger shock than reaching my word count. But that only happened after writing so much where I was narrating something that didn’t exist yet. And that exploration has to happen through structures and advice and processes that don’t work until suddenly something just…does.
That’s what writing is. It’s not about telling stories. As much as I didn’t like the Rose Field, I do agree with Philip Pullman on one thing5. Writing isn’t making things up. It’s a way of seeing, and in some ways, trying to see the story you know is already there.
Because when a piece fits, it just feels right.
Closing
Writing a novel has been one of the most impactful experiences of my life. If you take nothing else away from this post, it’s that the writing process is always daunting, but always worth it. I look forward to seeing where this second draft goes, because I highly doubt the simplicity laid out here is going to remain true.
Thanks, all, and keep writing.
Image; Crested Titmouse by Robert Havell, Jr.
The title has not changed since I was 10. It is one of the three things I have kept from this time, the other two being the existence of the caves and the protagonist’s name.
HAHAHA just kidding. One last piece of advice:
There are no fireworks that mark the end of each draft
I consider myself done with my first draft, not because I finished it, but because restructuring the story meant a lot of scenes suddenly had to be cut or moved, and new ones needed to be written at the beginning. I only got about ⅔ of the scenes done in the first draft, which means that I saved myself writing 40,000 words that probably wouldn’t have worked. Efficiency win?
How did this questionable decision occur? I opened it up one day, stared at it, typed a few words, erased them, and said, “yeah, no, this isn’t working anymore”
Then I sat down and rewrote the outline from start to finish, scene by scene, and made sure that the threads I was struggling with made sense this time, over the course of several hours. The vast majority of scenes are going to be heavily dissected and many are probably left behind. Somehow, the story had never felt more complete than in this 10,000 word summary. However, the next day, I chose to research fifteenth-century Irish bard school for a concerning number of hours to develop my side character. Progress is not linear.
I added this cringy Greek name later. It roughly translates to “displacements” and yet, it is meant to lightly satirize the sorting systems of YA literature.
Hey stop–look at me–you write it down carefully, understand? Do not scribble it on a napkin, or think you will remember. Disorganized notes are not your friend. Losing the answer to a hard question to the void is not productive.
Actually, a solid dozen things, but this was more dramatic