First and Worst

Oh, the first draft. So many events in publishing test an author's soul, but none as brutal as staring at the face of a first draft.

Someone collected a set of quotes, possible apocryphal, on Reddit recently, and they are universal in their apologetic, just-stick-it-out tone of the first draft. I'm wrestling with my own right now, flailing around in the weeds to try to shape the vision I hold in my head to approximate words on the page. Someone took mild issue with the collection, and suggested that "Just [write] a solid, good, first draft" was the solution. I took mild issue with that advice, because Reddit:

"Just" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. As is "solid." And, for that matter, "good."

Write a saggy, floppy, rambling, get-it-down first draft, shelve it for a month, and then come at it sideways with a red pen and a suit of armor is more my style. I can't shape the small until I've completed the large.

The interminable descriptions, the laggy choreography, the boring verbs and lame adjectives... the first draft is their realm. Excision later is freeing once I know what to cut and what to keep.

I stand by this, too, even though I hate it when I'm in the muck. It's easy to pitch advice about writing a bad (or good) First Draft, but that ease skulks out the door when it's time to buckle down and do the damn thing. I'm at sea now because I know the shape of this story, and I have to prevent myself from trying to trim the new work to fit the parts I've already put down. Preemptive editing throttles the life out of my writing and my spirit, and it's my own damn fault for backing up into the story like this again. I realized the main narrative was too short, and didn't have enough information in it to color in the weirdness happens vibe I have going, and there was room for another character in another timeline... essentially having assembled most of the complicated block tower, and then decide there's another second tower that needs to slide in under the first. I'm looking at the wobble I've made, and dreading the sound of the crash if I knock it over.

Also, there's no jokes.

Not yet. This piece I'm working on was a Serious Work, or at least I thought it was, something gothic and spooky and a little strange and slightly funny. The new, second thread I'm trying to weave in didn't have the slightly and I've been struggling to work at it. A sustained, serious-literature voice is not my drafting voice, and rarely my finished-product voice. The recipe was missing something, but I couldn't tell what. The flavor was off, that's all. But now, mucking around in the first-draft soup, I think I've found it. It's elusive, shy, fluttering around the edges, but I've spotted it more than once now, and I may know the shape of it, the element that can take the first draft from "worst draft" to "done draft."

🧩🦏 

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