Can I confess? When I saw this was the next post to write, I laughed to myself and thought ahhhh, now I remember why I haven’t written a blog post in so long.
I have a love-hate relationship when it comes to balancing outlining with the first draft. Finishing the first messy draft of Baggage last week made that painfully clear.
When to Start Drafting
What I thought I learned from The Pit Stop was that it was better to spend a lot more focus on doing multiple outlines up front so I wouldn’t waste months drafting what I would have to gut and replace in revision.
Well, it turns out, I spent months outlining and still have huge sections and subplots to rearrange in my first draft anyway!
Every writer’s process is different. And what might work for one story might not be ideal for the next. But after this latest exploration, I am going to cut out the “Draft Zero” 30,000 word outline from my process. I did two drafts of my outline for an upcoming project within one month, while I spent three months just swapping critiques on an extended outline/Draft Zero for Baggage in the second half of 2022. The first came in at 7,679 words when trimmed down to send to CPs (from an original around 9,000.) The second was 11,249 words. And critique partners were able to pick apart the character and plotting issues as easily with the 10,000 word outlines as they could have with a 30,000 word one. The latest revision outline for Baggage that went out this week was 6,949 words and does the same job.
The first draft is exploratory. It’s taken me a while to learn that. It’s going to be messy. And that’s okay. It would be weird if it isn’t. So let the freak mess fly and chug on through my friends.
Drafting Sequence
I used to follow my muses when drafting. If I didn’t feel like writing the next scene in the story, I’d skip around to one I was more excited about that day. While it kept me excited to come to the keyboard each time, it make my character motivations and internal dialogue a mess because it was hard to remember where they were on their character arc/growth journey since I kept bouncing around.
Now, I write from the first chapter to the last, chronologically straight through. This also allows me to send out early chapters to critique partners as I go, so I don’t have to wait months to do full swaps once I finish drafting.
When I find myself reluctant to come to the page, I let my ask explore that hesitation. Why don’t I want to write? Is this scene boring? If it’s boring for me to even write, then I can’t expect a reader to want to trudge through reading it.
Now, I focus on what I’m excited about writing in my current scene and the one after it. This helps keep me on track and wanting to write. And if I can’t come up with anything, well, then I know I’m in trouble and need to rethink this particular scene and see what I can change to make it more interesting.
When to Stop Drafting
Something else I explored while writing Baggage‘s first draft was to halt drafting after seven chapters. From critique feedback, I knew – no surprise – I over-drafted and had several things I needed to trim and fix. From forecasting my word count for chapters one through seven and projecting it out to the end of the novel, I also realized that *dun dun dun* the first draft was going to end up 110K-120K words long, like my first draft of The Pit Stop.
So I stopped and went back and revised my outline.
Three times.
Guess what?
Even though it comes in at 84,000 words now, it still has so many subplots that even I lost track of a few by the second half of the second act. I’m going to have to revise it all yet again anyway.
Lesson learned? Make revision notes off of critique partners’ feedback as I swap chapters, but do not stop to go back and start again at the beginning. This slowed my process down by months. And the feedback I received from the earlier chapters helped me brainstorm how to fix things in the later chapters as I wrote them. I could even start writing the changes it to later chapters if I wanted so I had less to revise come second draft time. (I didn’t do this with Baggage, but I did leave comments flagged to things to change or add/delete based off of revision ideas already spinning in my head.)
The Main Focus
When dealing with the first draft, the most important thing is to get it out of your head and onto the page. You can’t edit a blank page. And there’s no point continually going back and restarting to fix things until you have the full list of everything that needs to be repaired. It creates redundancy and extra work, which not only slows down the process but can cause us to lose momentum and faith in ourselves as writers. After all, we writer’s are no stranger to imposter syndrome.
So write, my friends. Write that hot mess express of a first draft. And take pride when you finish it. We have critique partners for a reason. They help us wade through the muck and make sense of what we wrote. They come up with ideas on how to improve that we can springboard off of for revision notes. But if we never get anything finished, we don’t have anything to send them. And the more times they set eyes on different iterations of the same thing, the more confusing it can be for them to remember what’s happening in the present version.
So enjoy the process. Embrace the suck! And then be ready to start all over again.
The first draft of Baggage, including stopping and rewriting, took me about four and a half months to write. How long does it typically take you to write your first draft?