First Draft Woes
I recently found myself stuck in the middle of a first draft manuscript for a novel, so I decided to take a break from it. Some things needed to be changed in some of the early chapters of the manuscript, and these changes were going to affect the entire course of the narrative, but I just didn’t have the energy to go back and make those changes, so I just gave up for a while. I thought that maybe if I just let it rest for a little while, perhaps I could revive it later on.
Turns out that was a bad idea.
One year later–this was just a few weeks ago–I finally took my laptop to Starbucks again and started reading through the manuscript. All the enthusiasm I used to have for the story came washing over me again, and I couldn’t wait to get moving with it. I was 40,000 words into the first draft, and my fingers were itching to do some typing.
But when I finished reading the first draft, I was still stuck. I sat there with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and I couldn’t find the words to type. The temptation to throw it all away and start over with something new was almost unbearable, and I realized that I was in the exact same position that I was in when I left the manuscript a year before.
I had expected a little time and distance to solve all my story problems for me, but a year of rest brought me no closer to solving my problems. My problem wasn’t that my story needed a while to rest. The problem was with the story itself.
I read over the last scene I had written and discovered that it was wretched. It lacked a lot of the enthusiasm and fervor of the rest of the manuscript. So I scrapped it. I only ended up deleting three or four pages of work, but it turned out that that’s exactly what I needed to do. The story was still in a bit of a funk, even after deleting those pages, but the act of deleting got me caught up in the story again. The next big event in the story’s plot was looming in the seemingly distant future, but when I got stuck, I decided to make that big event happen sooner.
And it worked! I discovered that I was dragging out the story too much, and it was causing me to become bored with it. And if I’M bored with it, imagine how my readers would feel! All I had to do was pick up the pace a little bit, and now I’m on a roll again.
Are there still problems with the earlier sections of my manuscript? Sure!
Am I worried about it? Not one bit! I’ll worry about that when I’m done with the first draft.
My point is this . . . Don’t get caught up with what you’ve already written until you get your first draft out of the way. Resist the urge to go back to earlier chapters and edit. Even if there are large changes that need to be made, simply make a note of it in a separate document and get on with your story. Tackle that first draft with every ounce of energy you’ve got! Your first draft doesn’t have to be good; it just has to BE!!! No one is going to read your first draft but you!
So if you’re stuck, get over it! Pick up the pace, kill one of your characters, cause something drastic to happen, ANYTHING to keep you writing! If it turns out horrible, it doesn’t matter! You can fix it later. Just get that first draft finished no matter the cost! You’ll thank yourself later!