How to Write a Novel: Attitude to the first draft

“Don’t be so afraid of writing badly that you don’t write at all.”

—SARK, Succulent Wild Woman

It’s time.

You’ve spent long enough preparing — maybe even procrastinating. At some point, you have to start writing.

Perhaps you already have pages of story fragments.

Perhaps you have nothing but an idea in your head.

It doesn’t matter what you have before you start. At some point, you must start writing the first draft and wrangle your chaos of thoughts and words into something that can be read by someone else.

You must take this step, or you will never finish your novel.

Remember the iceberg. You don’t need to know everything before you start. Just get going and figure the rest out later.

Your first draft won’t be perfect, and you certainly don’t need to show it to anyone, but at least you will have something to work with.

Of course, things will change in the editing process, but there’s a tremendous feeling of satisfaction when the first draft is done.

That feeling is your goal.

Before we get into the practicalities of writing, here are two ideas that helped me when I started out.

Write the “shitty first draft”

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

—Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

One of the life-changing moments in my writing life was when I learned that the first draft is just that — the first draft.

A reader will never see it. An editor should probably never see it.

This draft is for you. Once it’s finished, you can start editing and make the manuscript better on the next pass.

The myth of writing is that an author sits down and creates a perfect, fully formed sentence on the page, followed by another and another, until they have finished a superb story in one attempt.

But that’s not how writing works.

You will never see the first draft of your favorite book and, as a new writer, you can only compare someone else’s finished novel to your first draft writing. That’s not a fair comparison, so try not to do it!

It helped me to reframe my initial attempt as Anne Lamott’s “shitty first draft.” It took away the fear that my writing might be terrible because it didn’t matter anymore. It might be terrible, but I could fix it later.

Give yourself permission to write whatever you want in that first draft with the knowledge that only you will see it.

Create the block of stone from which you will create your finished work

This metaphor might also help. Consider Michelangelo’s famous statue of David, which stands in the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Italy. It is a perfection of a finished work of art, an iconic sculpture that draws people from all over the world hundreds of years after its creation.

Michelangelo said that he could see the finished sculpture in the marble. All he had to do was cut away the extraneous material to reveal it.

Imagine an enormous block of marble hewn straight from the quarry.

Michelangelo would have hacked at it with heavy tools at first to remove larger pieces, then used finer chisels, then ground and polished until, finally, the statue of David emerged, a creative vision in marble.

Now think about writing a novel.

We have to create the block of marble — the first draft — so we can then hack, chisel, grind, and polish in the editorial process until we reach our finished creative vision in words.

Have fun! Or at least find joy and satisfaction in the process

As writers, we often take ourselves way too seriously.

But why would you write if it was only going to be painful?

I spent thirteen years in a job I hated; every day featured tasks I found pointless, except as a way to pay the bills.

Of course, writing is a challenge. It’s hard work, and it’s tiring.

But you’re making stuff up by choice. It’s creative, it could even be… [shock horror] fun!

Consider the first draft as a form of creative play. You can mess around, no one will see it. Free your inner child and see what they come up with.

“I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only truly subversive position left to take as a creative person these days.”

—Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

Questions:

• How will you approach the first draft? What attitude shift might help?

Resources: