Treating the First Draft Like a First Draft

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. And for almost as long, I’ve tried to be a writer. I’ve been coming up with characters and stories since I was very young, but tried writing my first story when I was in six grade. I was immediately hooked and only continued to attempt, writing as often as I could bring myself to do. I all but hung my entire personality on being an aspiring author for years.

The truth-I was barely writing. As far as actual time spent. It would take me 1-5 years to finish a first draft, sometimes longer. My identity was wrapped up in being a writer, but my actions weren’t fully. Looking back, I distinctly remember feeling like a writer every day and feeling like I was committing myself to writing every day.

But I had days where I didn’t write at all. (And even, much much longer periods than that). I would be over at a friend’s house and have my laptop out, staring at the screen while we hung out. I’d get a few sentences down maybe. Or I’d be home and throw on some episodes of the Office for whenever I got distracted from trying to brute force what would come next. For more than fifteen years, writing ‘was my life’ and I hardly did any of it.

Then some personal things happened towards the start of 2020. Even before Covid. I started my first serious job, I got my own place, my time was divested and my priorities were changing. I’d been struggling with the second or third draft of a book I’d been trying to write for seven years. I stopped writing and started devoting my time to other things.

I finally disproved the false belief that the only way I could be happy-the only way I’d have a life-was if I wrote. I didn’t write and I had a life. It was a great life. I had a lot of fun. I grew. I was happy. I still am happy. My whole life it had felt like I had to write. Going through those few years taught me something. I don’t have to write to have a good life. I want to write. Like, really want to write. That’s all that matters.

It was a slow return to writing. I had it in my head that I wanted to use my podcast as a way to motivate myself to get back into writing the book that I was working on. It took about a year. Each episode was a chapter from the last draft and eventually I caught up to where I had stopped writing all of those years ago. Then I started continuing from where I’d left off.

Finally, I was back to writing. But it was still this thing that I had to do. It wasn’t something that came naturally or something I felt I could just sit down to do it. It was hard. To even just get myself to set out to actually do it. A great friend, Juan Heinrich told me two things that changed everything for me (no matter how many times throughout the years he had told me these exact two things without it registering…lol).

One had to do with the story, or lack thereof, of the book I was working on. The other was this; “If you want to actually become a professional writer one day, then you have to look at it as a craft. You have to accept that there are a bunch of skills involved in that and that you don’t have some of them. The only way to gain those skills is to do the work. And you do the work by writing every day, as often as you can.

His advice about the story I was working on and how to go about fixing it (sitting down and structuring a new outline) quickly led to me starting a different story entirely from the one I’d been struggling with for a decade. But this secondary advice about ‘writing as craft’ is what led to me actually writing for the first time in my life-seriously.

Because of this conversation about craft and skills, when I first started to come up with my initial idea for what has become my current work in progress, “The Last Dragon” I did something I never have before in my writing life.

Before ever writing the first scene, I sat down to write an outline. Now, my entire life, friends and mentors who lean more naturally towards the plotting side of writing have tried to encourage me to outline. I always just assumed and believed that I couldn’t outline because it seemed too difficult to me. I had some mental wall up that I’d never tried to scale properly.

But those words about craft and skills allowed me to push through. I was able to stop and think, maybe outlining is just a skill I don’t posses and doing this will help me on that road. I found that when I sat down in front of the computer with a document titled ‘outline’ and after I’d word vomited the general conceit of the novel, everything slid into place. It was as if a my mind went into a completely different state. Like, because I had decided I was going to outline, my brain’s outline lens had shifted into gear.

I’d never felt that I could outline because I’d never properly attempted it before. Just in attempting it I accessed a completely different and effective way of thought that I never had before. Embracing the other aspect of the writing advice “write every day as often as you can” I began working on the outline for 1-3 hours a day. After a week I had a sixty page outline done. 30% of it may have only covered the first five chapters. But that was that and that was done. I had an outline. Beginning, middle, end. I had a story.

That was the most important thing. I knew what “The Last Dragon” was about. I knew where I was going and how to get there.

Now, another thing that I always struggled with was feeling like things had to be perfect. I remember, years in the passed when I’d be working on a different book, I’d know that there was this other character talking, but I hadn’t given them name yet. I felt as if I couldn’t write the next sentence if I didn’t know the character’s name. Sometimes I could do some research and eventually get inspired, but often I just had to wait until it came to me.

That could mean that I went an; hour, day, week, or month before I was able to continue writing. I’d have an ‘aha’ moment and then begin writing again until the next wall that I came up against. More often than not, that was the writing block that I ran into more than anything else. And it wasn’t just names. I was discovering writing everything without an idea of where it might end up or what would happen. Whole cloth creating the first initial scene and then off of that, whole cloth creating the next. ‘Bashing my head against the keyboard’ until the letters formed sentences. And hopefully just hopefully, those sentences formed a story. And if I was really lucky, maybe someone would enjoy it.

The first draft of The Last Dragon was where things changed. I started to suspect that the reason I had a hard time with treating first drafts like first drafts was because I didn’t think I’d have the skills to properly edit shitty first draft. So the first draft couldn’t be shitty. It had to be perfect. There’s no way I was going to be able to edit.

That was the lie I had always told myself. Why? Because editing is a skill. And the only way to gain and grow a skill is in the do. Writing itself is a skill. I’d spent so much of my life writing that that was my most developed skill. I’d barely spent any of it editing. So my writing was here and my editing was all the way down here. I felt like I was a much better writer than I was an editor. And I was. That’s the thing. That’s true. And it’s what made me a terrible writer for most of my life.

I had to embrace the idea of gaining these skills which meant embracing the awkward age of the big suck. I decided, for myself, I wasn’t going to get stuck how i had in the past. If I couldn’t think of a character’s name-fuck it. (Insert character name) is what would appear in the manuscript until the second draft. Most character names I figured out by the halfway point. But the same thing was true for the name’s of kingdoms or even for descriptions.

Examples: (Come up with description for the kingdom. Try to put a good image in the reader’s mind and establish some of the future conflict.)

(I don’t know how to describe Pyrus getting out of this situation. He has to fight these two guys in the room and I have nothing… I’m skipping ahead to the hallway, I’ll write this later)

The old me would have nearly fainted at this idea. That I could just…skip a scene and come back later? But you see, it was all about momentum for me. For me, that is the first draft. Anything that is going to slow me down and keep me from writing it as quickly as possible, needs to be a bolded note in brackets and pushed aside for the future.

After the first draft is done (let’s not even talk about the second and thirds-I’m partway through the third draft now and only just processing what the experience of the first draft was. It will have to be a future post where I talk about learning just how not done my novel is baha) I can spend hours, or days, or weeks, or months even thinking about a character’s name. Or tiling away at tirelessly trying to craft the perfect description of something.

There’s time for that later. Time to research. Time to get real nitpicky and smart. For me, I’ve learned, that time is not the first draft. The first draft is about momentum and getting the damn thing done. Getting the story on paper so I can see just how bad it is. And also, see the little nuggets I love that came out of nowhere-inspired-in the middle of all of the motivated chaos.

It took me 1-5 years to write first drafts in the past. The first draft of “The Last Dragon” took six months. Here’s to many more.

Thanks,

-Y.J. Sargis