First Draft Lessons

A few days ago, I completed the first draft of my novel. This was the fourth version I’d written of it. I started it in August 2011, got swamped by the size of it, and quit. I started it again in early 2012, and had the same experience. A third try in 2014 ended the same as the previous times. By September 2016, I had gained some new knowledge of how Story works, the essential elements to the novel, its three main parts and their purposes, and so forth. I created an outline for the first part. I had word count goals. I created a tentative schedule of writing. I had a plan. After less than two weeks, this fourth attempted ended as it had before.

A couple of months ago, I made another attempt. After fifty days of daily effort, I typed “The End” to the manuscript. I had finally done it. I had written my novel. I’m not completely sure why this fourth time was successful where the others weren’t, but here’s what I’ve come to thus far.

First, for me, I had to settle some inner issues. The first, and most intractable, was the matter of vocation. My upbringing, and early adult formation, was geared toward looking at one’s life as fulfilling a vocation, living out a calling. God, the universe, your genes—something—had touched you and given you certain gifts and abilities that were to be utilized for God’s glory, the betterment of mankind, to realize your full potential. There was a lot packed into the notion of being a writer. I wasn’t sure if I measured up, if I had what it takes, if I was wasting my time. I was seeking external validation. Were there objectives evidences that one could take into Vocation Court and prove to Yer Honor that, yes, indeed, by a preponderance of the evidence, this man right here has a calling to be a writer? No matter what I brought to bear on this question, there was no certainty to be had. I was looking for something like proof, over feeling, over vanity, that I could point to and say, “It’s a fact: I’m a writer.”

What I had to come to was something much more basic. I loved writing. It gave me joy. Love was the revelation I needed. I was a writer.

The other inner issue I had to settle was one of shame and guilt. Well meaning adults had spoken into my life as a young boy in grade school and junior high school, and later as a young man in high school and college, and told me that my writing had to be expressed in a certain way, there was only a particular kind of story I could tell. If I wrote for mere escapism, or fancy, and not in service to a greater good, I was wasting my time and my talent. This was reinforced in a marriage that was difficult and dysfunctional. It was reinforced by friends who could only ask if I could make a living by writing, or hinted that my writing would only be validated by bestseller status. This layered over a suffocating blanket of shame and guilt associated with my writing. I did receive solid and specific affirmation and validation of my writing by a couple of my junior high teachers and a couple of my college professors, as well as other friends. But the feelings of shame and guilt associated with my writing, only made me more desperate to find an objective and irrefutable proof of my calling to be a writer.

But when love revealed my vocation, it also dissipated the shame and guilt. If love revealed the vocation, it could not also condemn it nor require that I justify it before I expressed it. Love was both the revelation and the justification.

While all this was going on, I was also writing everyday. That was essential. Had I simply tried to work this out entirely on the interior plane, it would have dissolved in mere solipsism. But by taking action and doing the writing for which I was seeking a vocation, it invited just the resources and encounters, indeed, the wisdom and discernment, that I needed to answer the question.

The action of writing everyday, also revealed to me some insights into accomplishing the first draft.

Having an outline plotted out helped me immensely. But when I say outline, it was not detailed. I numbered each scene and wrote a one- or two-sentence summary. That was it. Having a target to shoot for helped direct my daily efforts. But having it more general allowed room for movement. In my first attempt, six years ago, I outlined the novel along the same lines, but the difference is that six years ago, I outlined the entire novel before I started writing it. On this fourth attempt, I only outlined one act (of three) at a time. This allowed me some adjustments as I continued the first draft.

The second attempt on this story about five years ago, I didn’t outline at all, and just wrote whatever came to me each time I put hands on the keyboard. That fizzled out real quick in a chaotic mess. I tried to keep it loose, but with a little more organization for the third attempt in 2014, only plotting the major scenes of the novel. But it was the same result: a hot mess.

In all of my previous three attempts, I set word count goals for each time I sat down to write: 1000 words, then 500 words, then 1667 words (during National Novel Writing Month). That took my attention to the wrong place and my writing was bloated and repetitive.

For this attempt, I quite literally set as a goal for each day: one complete sentence. That was something I knew I could accomplish on a daily basis. My lowest daily word count during the time I was completing that first draft was 199 words. A decent little paragraph. I found, however, that developing that daily consistency increased my word count as I got further and further along. In the beginning, I was hovering around 500 words per day, then 1000, then 2000, and then on weekends, I would reach 5000, 6000 and in one final push on the day before I completed the first draft: more than 7000 words.

I found that at first I would only do one session per day, usually on my lunch break at work. I could write 500 or more words in less than half an hour. I would be done, and I was free then to do whatever else I wanted. But as time went on, I found myself instinctively seeking out more opportunities to write. I might get out a couple hundred words prior to leaving for work, add five or six hundred on my lunch break, and then come home and write another thousand. And over time the weekends became pipe fitter labors, as I planned two or three sessions each day, adding 4000 to 5000 words each day, or close to 10,000 over the weekend. On my last weekend before finishing, I put in 14,000 words.

To say it another way, love led the way. I found that rather than making it about performing an obligation, rather than focusing on accomplishing a numerical target, but simply letting it be an exercise of love, I accomplished far more than I ever could have imagined. I wrote more than 83,000 words in fifty days.

So, putting down some targets, hanging loose on the details, and keeping the daily expectations almost pro forma, leaving it loose as to particular output, it freed me up to deliver far more than I ever had before.

I also learned to be comfortable with learning where the story was going on that first draft. In my first version, the story began pretty quickly to veer off what I had outlined, as my characters interacted with each other and reacted to events, and as my gut went in different directions. But in my second version, with nothing to guide my writing, the story went all over the place. It was the mid-way compromise, outlining each act as I went along helped to encourage creativity but also to focus it.

Even more importantly, I became comfortable with writing crappy scenes, knowing that this was my first drat and I could change it later. I even backtracked on two scenes and rewrote them. I didn’t panic or freak out.

Prior to starting this fourth version, I also clarified and tightened up my understanding of the essential elements of Story: inciting incidents, progressive complications, crises, climaxes and resolutions. I learned that like Russian dolls, these elements are the core of the novel, the acts of the novel, the scenes of the novel and so on. This is the aspect of writing craft for which I needed more development. But I couldn’t get that development without writing.

Finally, I learned that I have a heck of a lot more to learn. I may know that each scene must have the five elements of Story, but whether I accomplished that in each scene will have to be determined. During the first draft, I was just writing to complete each scene. Now it’s time for revision and editing, for analysis and criticism. I suspect I’ll have more to say about that in coming days.