For about five
minutes, before realising I have to start all over again.
In an ideal world you’ve started the next book long before the last one is published, because, if publication goes badly it’s a
good distraction and if it goes well, there’s nothing like writing a crappy
first draft to keep your head from swelling.
But sometimes that book you started doesn’t get that far and
you find yourself starting again and again. That’s where I am at the minute. At
square one. Yet again. In total, I have started 8 different novels, finished 4 and
published 1
but in the process, I have learned three things about starting a
book and here they are:
1. It will never be the same as writing the first one. The
first one seemed easy because you only wrote when you felt like it. You got on
with your life and your other hobbies (remember those?) and when the ideas came
you grabbed a pen. There was much less agonised staring at blank screens, and yeah
it took longer, but you enjoyed the actual writing more. Now, you’re under pressure to write another one. Not because some
amazing idea is bursting to get out of you, but because people are waiting for the
book. Which is a much less inspiring reason.
If you do have an idea, you are not at liberty to wait and see if it niggles
enough to indicate it’s worth writing. You’re not at liberty to stand at the
bus stop of ideas and wait for the next one because this one appears to have a
drunk driver and no seats. You have to go for it, and you have to set yourself deadlines.
Which means you have a much higher risk of failure and a much
higher risk of writing, not on the crest of a tidal wave of inspiration, but
running on the fumes of your own depleted creative brain. So –
2. Acknowledge this, and do
not panic.
It took me more semi-completed novels than I care to mention but
I now recognise that feeling of Oh God, I can’t do this for what it is. Panic. More importantly, I now
also know that it does not last.
In the beginning stages of a novel I can go
from utter despair to Yeah, actually this
is pretty good, and back again, in the space of fifteen minutes.
Sometimes you
spend weeks panicking, sometimes it’s going great for days on end and then one
day you open the laptop and somehow your beautiful story has transformed into
the worst mush you’ve ever seen.
You can’t stop panic happening, the important
thing is just to acknowledge that it won’t
last. Go to work as usual and by the end of the day you’ll probably feel better
about things. And if not, you’ll feel better the day after that. Or the week
after that. Or the month after that. The point is, it’s not forever and you
shouldn’t trust your own judgement about your work when you’re in that state,
any more than you would drive a car while having a panic attack.
Anyway, even
if your story is crap now -
3. It’s going to change radically before you’re done. When I look
back at early drafts of my first novel there’s so much stuff that got changed, dropped or overhauled. Whole characters,
plotlines, subplots, chapters, themes and ideas were cut. Even the structure
and the genre changed along the way. If
I’d tried to assess my chances of writing a great novel based on those early
pages I’d have curled up in despair.
In the first few weeks of my current WIP I
found that this all happened in a much more concentrated space of time (see:
deadlines). Inside a week the entire plot could have changed three times and every
time I got that ‘Oh, wait, maybe it should
be like this…’ feeling, my heart would sink because:
- This involves even more crossroad-moment decision agony
- I now have to go back and rework those 10,000 words again
- And this is probably a waste of time because I’ll change my mind tomorrow but there’s only one way to find out if this one is The One…
I have a suspicion that a lot of bottom drawer novels never
progressed purely because people hate and fear that ‘I need to make major changes’
feeling. They resist it and they plough on dutifully with their original concept
because every step forward has been so
difficult that taking one back is unthinkable. And then eventually you’re too
far down the road to even see the crossroads anymore.
Or maybe they flew through an entire first draft in a NaNo-frenzy and didn’t give the ideas time to breathe, so by the time it came to editing, it was too momentous to change things.
Or maybe they flew through an entire first draft in a NaNo-frenzy and didn’t give the ideas time to breathe, so by the time it came to editing, it was too momentous to change things.
This is like doing your maths homework in pen.
Allow for changes and let
those changes happen early. It doesn’t matter if it means rewriting 30,000
words in another tense, POV, or as a diary. It doesn’t matter if it involves
chopping that chapter that had the really amazing last line. It doesn’t matter
if it means killing the character that was based on your Granny.
Try every
change that occurs to you. Be open to the maddest idea that crosses your mind, even the one where your first thought is ‘I can’t do that!’, because your next
thought, if you allow it to come, will be, ‘Can I?’ (And btw, readers live for those moments.)
Put the work in now, and enjoy the liberating fact that it’ll
probably be rubbish and that that’s just part of the process of elimination on
your way to The One. It’s much easier to do it now than hear it from your agent
when you’ve wrestled a whole book, Chinese Foot-Binding Style, into a form it
was never meant to take.
Matt Haig says the 30,000 word mark is the hard bit and
everything after 50,000 is coasting, and that’s so true. I’m at 30,000 words
exactly this week and this is where the big decisions are made. You’ve explored
your characters and your world a bit, you’ve set up some ideas and themes and
it was all great fun. But now you have to write the second half, and the second
half depends entirely on the first
half, which means your first half has got to be rock solid. By the time you get
to 50,000 you’re just adding the other half of a lot of equations you’ve already
set up, but setting them up in the first place is hard.
So my daily mantra these days is, take your time and
don’t despair. And don't be jealous of writers who fly through a first draft in 6 weeks and tell you it's brilliant. Be suspicious of those writers and the quality of their work. Very, very suspicious.
If you get the first half right, the rest is plain sailing. So be kind to your future self and put the work in now. And expect it to be hard, expect it to be slow, expect there to be panic (it’s much less scary if you know and accept that it’s coming). But most of all, remember, everything's going to be OK.
If you get the first half right, the rest is plain sailing. So be kind to your future self and put the work in now. And expect it to be hard, expect it to be slow, expect there to be panic (it’s much less scary if you know and accept that it’s coming). But most of all, remember, everything's going to be OK.
5 comments:
Some very good tips here. Yes, you have to learn to LOVE scrapping half a novel and rewriting it, to take a dreadful glee in doing the exact opposite of what your inner editor wants to do and making it work. I've met several fledgling writers who, as you say, Kelly, cling to their first draft with all its faults, because they put so much into it, they can't bring themselves to scrap and rewrite a good half of it.
You've really met people who've claimed they wrote a first draft in six weeks? Wow. I'd have asked to see it - and curled up & died if it was anything other than absolute tosh. Hope the panic attacks go off and sulk somewhere dark now you've got them sorted.
Yeah, I can understand their reluctance but it's better in the long run.
I have, and I am deeply sceptical.
I think definition of 'first draft' varies between people. And also, that's just the way some people work. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Mines in six weeks, and Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in ten days. There isn't one right way to do things. Different isn't necessarily bad. We need to take people's lives into account, too. Some people might get a few weeks a year they can focus on writing all day, while others can work (say) early each morning or late each night. Some people also do so much detailed preparation and planning that they can write through the novel itself very quickly. The variety of methods that work is inspiring!
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