Chapter 7 Just Write: Part 2

Because I ran out of room last week rambling on about why you should just write, I never got around to my second of the two quotes.
It is both painful to receive, and hard to accept, but it is entirely correct, and if received properly should be quite liberating as well. This famous phrase was said by the esteemed literary genius Ernest Hemingway.

Without further ado: "The first draft of everything is shit."

I remember this quote quite well because in my own writing, as well as the people I have discussed these points with, I find two things to be true about any first draft. That we all either spend so much time proofreading our first draft that we forget what the ending of the piece is we are writing. Or we are at the other end of the pendulum. We throw down words so fast that there is no regard whatsoever for spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, writing format, the English language...

You get the idea.

So who is right? And more importantly, which leads to better writing? Honestly that's a loaded question and the answer falls somewhere near the 'I don't know' category.

Here's what happened to me.

I would start a new idea, character, or subplot with a super-high level of excitement. I would attack whatever it was with unparalleled ferocity. About three words in I would start to notice that things were getting a little bit dodgy. My sentences would be three paragraphs long, I would shorthand words like 'the' and 'it', I would forget to use my space bar for word after word. You get the idea. Well being a bit of a perfectionist about my work would force me to stop my mad blitzkrieg, and start fixing every little problem on the spot. Things would be so ugly that it would take a while, and suddenly I would forget what it was I was writing about.
I would lose the amazing idea, and be left with little memory of something epic that would have made my story a million times better. But at least my half finished idea could pass a spell-check.

Still there are others who come prepared with a much better game plan, and actually develop their ideas before they try to write them. I hope to start trying this approach when I work on my future projects.



My intentions are to get better at drafting because quite frankly it is time consuming to have to re-word your sentences, or go through numerous rewrites just to make your writing presentable. I can't consider myself a writer until I know how to write properly. So for me it is a learning curve every time I put pen to paper, or rather finger to key.

Drafting isn't an easy process, it's really quite time consuming. Especially if it takes numerous tries to get something right. I have probably written close to 300,000 words for Overshadowed, and that is way to many for the finished product.

The story of how I ended up writing that many words is a sad tale, one echoed by many aspiring writers. After completing the second revision I started doing what is referred to as line-editing. I started doing this simply because it felt necessary, it was the next step that made sense.
I went through the entire book line by line and changed the wording in basically every sentence. I know now of course that was totally premature. I was not ready for line-editing, neither was the book. I just knew something was wrong with my story, and that was the only thing I knew to do that seemed like it might fix the problem. Now that I have matured as a writer I know more of what needed to be done. But of course it's too late for that now.

What I needed to do was more drafting. My story, as good as it was, drifted all over the place. My characters were malnourished, and under-developed. My timeline was mixed up. I needed to fix the terrible ending, and improve the boring beginning. Most of these fixes were ideas that my editor presented to me when she started the repair work. I honestly was just not looking at the story objectively enough. I needed to take a step back and analyze my work, perhaps if I had done that I would have made at least some of the necessary adjustments, instead of working around in circles.

I could cover a few more points about drafting and perhaps I'll touch on them soon, but that is all for now


Practical advice:

Plan ahead, set goals and work towards them.

This weeks PA may feel a little bit like a cop out and that's because it is :-). Well not really it's more of a practical encouragement than advice.

Writing is hard, much harder than anyone who hasn't done it knows. And truthfully as with any challenging task, it can also be discouraging. Expect this, because it will happen. Just last week I was extremely disheartened, to the point I wanted to quit.

Novel writing also takes time, lots of that as well. Again this can be discouraging. Don’t expect your story to come together in a few weeks. I have expected my novel to be done several different times now (3 to be exact), and every time I’m glad that I accept that it is not ready.

You can combat discouragement in a number of ways, but one that always works for me is to anticipate it happening and avoid it by setting a goal for myself. Not some pie in the sky type of goal, but a reachable one. I only have one goal right now, and that is to complete Overshadowed by the end of this year. I honestly don’t know if I'm going to reach that goal or not, but that isn’t leaving me discouraged. Instead trying to reach this goal has excited me to write more, and write more consistently. It's an exciting time for me, and can be for you as well. Just keep working toward your goals.

'Til next time...