It’s been a long time since I wrote a first draft. Five years to be exact. I’ve been working on the first draft of my second book for a few weeks and honestly, it’s tougher than I remember.
I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s more of a struggle this time around. I believe this second story is stronger than my first. I feel like I did a much better job on the outline as far as plot, pacing, and character development. The concept is unique, the outline is solid. So why do I look back on every sentence I write and think this is terrible?
Well, probably because it is.
Take it away, Hemingway…..
Pardon the language, but ole Hemingway was right. There is a reason these are called rough drafts.
I think when I wrote my first draft of Enemies of Doves, I didn’t realize it was terrible. I mean, I knew it needed work, but had no idea how much work it needed. I didn’t know what my best looked like. Now that I do, it’s hard not to compare the crap I’m writing now to the writing in the pages of my published book.
So for fun last night I pulled up my first draft of Enemies of Doves. All 181,000 unedited words of it. It was a document that my computer told me hadn’t been opened since 2016. AND MAY IT NEVER BE OPENED AGAIN. 😛 It was terrible, I cringed before I even made it to the third paragraph. Overwriting, information dumps, telling not showing—you name it and I did it, all in the first chapter.
I spent so long editing, I’m still in that editing mindset where I’m trying to make everything good, but this is a fool’s errand because the first draft can’t be good. It just has to be. Once I write my awful first draft, I’ll write a better second one, and elegant third, and so on. But I must start somewhere.
So I’ll leave this blog and return to my Word file where I can get some more terrible writing done. After all, I can fix anything except a blank page.
Shanessa Gluhm 