Writing Workshop: First Drafts Stop For No Woman!

You all gave me some fantastic blogging ideas in the last post and I’m excited like a Kindergartner on the third day of school (once he’s gotten over his crippling fear of being away from Mommy, that is) to get to those topics. To give you all a glimpse of what is on the horizon in the weeks to come we’ll be chatting about body types in the media (specifically in comic books), how to organize/pre-plan your book, how to communicate with aliens, and how to write cyber-punk.

Today, however, we’re gonna get elbows deep into something that every writer, since the first Neanderthal picked up some charcoal and started scribbling Emu’s on his man-cave wall, has struggled with: Stopping.

Specifically the question posed to me was this: Do you ever feel like starting over from the beginning and diving into revisions with your manuscripts even when the story is not yet completed?

There are a Tonka truck’s worth of bad reasons to stop writing whilst in the midst of a first draft. Hell, you could probably fill up said child’s toy-truck with as many good reasons for stopping, too. But you shouldn’t.

You should never, ever, not even when you stub your toe and fall over, stop in the middle of a first draft. The temptation is there with a physicality that makes it almost impossible to ignore. But ignore it you shall, for if you stop a legion of bees shall descend from the heavens and fill your shoes with honey. Which sounds nice at first, but trust me, it gets old real quick.

Your brain is divided into two hemispheres, and it oversimplifies a *very* complicated subject to say that one side is responsible for *creativity* and the other for *logic*, but this is a simple blog, so that’s exactly what we’re gonna do. No, I’m just kidding, we’d never take a short-cut like that.

Or would we? See chart below.

Yes, okay, well…. I guess we do take shortcuts here, but that’s good for you ’cause it’s gonna save you all sorts of time.

Though it’s not so cut and dry as the picture would indicate, there is a lot of research to support the idea that the right hemisphere deals with language more fluidly/creatively than the left hemisphere which handles language in a more utilitarian fashion.

Anthony, what the hell does this have to do with writing that First Draft? I’m glad you asked, because honestly I’d forgotten what we we’re talking about.

Back on topic!

When you dive into a first draft it should be with that right hemisphere churning through the creative effluvia that oozes from your gray matter. You should pay very little attention to sentence structure, proper grammar, spelling, plot, internal consistency. None of this stuff matters. YET!

Your goal in that first draft is to just get the words out. Spray them onto the page and wherever they hit/stick is where they shall lay until you come around in the second draft with a scalpel and start getting surgical on that shit. But, until you hit the end of that first draft, you better not stop!

The reason goes back to our brain and the way it works. It’s completely normal, and a well documented phenomena, that, at around 30,000 words into a full length novel, the author, without fail, will have an epiphany in the form of a brilliant white light that may, or may not, be the result of an Angel’s divine intervention, to pass along the very important memo that your story sucks.

Unfortunately, it’s true. Your story probably does suck at this point. As the author you can step back and see more plot-holes than a Minnesota highway after the winter thaw. It’s inevitable that you’ll have the temptation to stop, go back, and fix it.

But that’s wrong, wrong, wrong for a number of very important reasons. First, from a conservation of energy standpoint, it’s a complete waste of time. Sure, you can go back and get that first half of the draft nice and spiffy, but then you still have the second half of the novel staring back at you like the dark eye of Sauron, and who the hell knows what’s going to happen when you dive into that guy’s pupil.

What I mean by that is this: even with a great outline, your story is going to take some organic twists and turns as your characters figure out how to go from point A to point B (or, if you have some really unruly characters like mine, they up and say “Forget this noise, I’m not going to A or B, I’m going to Disneyland!! Then you got a whole new problem, namely, humans running around in mice costumes. I ask you: How is Disneyland not the scariest place on Earth?)

So don’t waste your energies going back and fixing the first half of your story when you aren’t even sure it’s gonna jive with the second half. That’s the first really good reason to not go back and it pretty much boils down to me being lazy and not doing more work than needed.

The second is this: when we hop out of first draft mode, we take our creativity cap off and put on our editor hat. We are switching sides of our brains as the task before us is of a completely different nature. Now we’re analyzing, cutting and pasting, making the language and words work the way they’re supposed to. Before, when we’re being creative, none of that shit matters. We’re throwing words at the wall and hoping they stick. During the second draft we go back to figure out which words are now worth keeping.

But here’s the trouble: the brain doesn’t switch from one side to the other at the drop of a dime. Most important, when the analytic portion of your brain takes over, it sours everything the creative side can put out. You become guarded and self-conscious about the words your putting down.

That, my friend, is a slippery slope. You can’t create your best works when you’re being guarded, self-conscious, or analytical. You need that free flowing nature child sort of creativity. The sort that doesn’t care if your words are actually making sense.

We’ll take our example from children here. They are wonderfully creative because they are unabashed. Their analytic skills are non-existent and as such their imaginations are extraordinary. As adults we don’t tap into that mind place so easily and alot of it has to do with the way creativity is ground out of us in middle school/high school/college. Conformity is the best way to survive the adolescent jungle of high-school. It’s not a good time to be weird, unfortunately.

But to create something beautiful and unique, you have to be weird. You have to be original. And you simply cannot do that when you’re being critical. So turn off that left hemisphere when you’re writing your first draft. Ignore it entirely and just leap into your first draft with reckless abandon. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to fix it later, but your first and most important task is to get the words out.

Until you’ve vomited all the words up and you’re left a dried up husk of a human, don’t stop.