First Drafts: A Love Story
Dear Blog,
So it turns out that November is NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. I am not taking part for lots of reasons and non-reasons but mainly because while I’d like it to be possible, there is just no way I am going to produce however many words you are supposed to produce in a month during naptimes. Anyway, the idea is that you write like crazy and produce, in a month, a draft of a novel. That can freak people out if they think they are supposed to produce a good draft, but as the wonderful Anne Lamott says in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” first drafts are almost always shitty. In a chapter reassuringly titled “Shitty First Drafts,” she writes:
“I know some very great writers, writers you love and who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
So, that’s good to know. The first draft is just getting the story on paper. Worrying about quality is what revisions are for, and from my experience so far, the revision process takes much longer and is much harder than the first draft. If my life allows for it, I’d love to do NaNoWriMo one day (which, as a number of people have pointed out, should be called NaNoDraMo – both for the rhythm and for accuracy, it’s a draft you’re producing, not a novel). I love writing first drafts. Writing the messy thing I will never show anybody. Getting the story down, and not worrying (yet) about whether it is any good.
The first novel-length draft I ever wrote was (is?) called Another Dance for Amaterasu. I was living in a small apartment on the edge of Tokyo with my oldest friend. I was toying with some ideas for a murder mystery set in Tokyo, since riding the trains every day made me feel murderous and I thought I ought to make some use of all that otherwise useless anger. Then, somewhere (I don’t remember where) I read about a sleep disorder in which the sufferer goes into REM sleep but is unable to go on into deep sleep. Because they are only ever sleeping lightly, people with this rare disorder become utterly exhausted, and they dream whenever they sleep. In the article, a man was quoted saying he was so tired that his dreams began to seem more vivid than his life, and he would sometimes doze off and begin dreaming while walking to the bus stop. I thought: Amazing story idea! And then, because I am not entirely heartless, I also thought: Poor guy, that must suck. I started to write about a young Canadian expat in Tokyo whose waking life and dream life were blurring and bleeding into each other. It was a jumbled mess of too-many-storylines and Japanese and Greek mythology, Orpheus and Ame no Uzume shrugging at each other across the pages, wondering, what are we doing together in this scrambled attempt at a book anyway? It didn’t work. But that first draft? Pure joy. I wrote it at home, in cafes, in parks, on the subway. I loved my characters. I still love those characters, and am sorry to have given them such a confused, confusing, fragmented story to live in. If I learned anything, it was that I am a writer who needs to outline. In detail.
The second novel that I finished became Shade & Sorceress, my first published book. I was stuck with Amaterasu. If the first draft was a gleeful sprint, the revisions were a slog. I wasn’t making it work. I needed a break. I decided to write a fantasy story for my niece and nephew. It was meant to be a Christmas present, a fun little novella. I came up with the premise ridiculously quickly, and started making notes. The first thing I wrote, in a tiny room on an oil processing ship in China’s Bohai Bay (what I was doing there is a whole other story), was a conversation between my heroine Eliza and her nemesis, Nia. The delight of writing something new, of finding new voices and a new story that wasn’t the stuck story, was exhilarating. The novel flew out of me, the story kept on growing, and by the time I had a draft done, I had outlines of the next two books.
I drafted the sequel in Princeton, New Jersey, in a claustrophobic grad student apartment. It felt like my only real escape from my should-I-get-pregnant-do-I-really-want-a-baby-no-that’s-a-terrible-idea-I-definitely-don’t-want-a-baby-what-the-hell-would-I-do-with-a-baby-except-I-really-do-want-a-baby-and-how-did-we-end-up-in-New-Jersey-anyway crisis. The fun was in working with relationships between already developed characters. I didn’t need to introduce them, or introduce them to each other. I didn’t need to set anything up. All that work had been done in the first book, and the second book felt like the payoff.
I wrote a draft of the third book in the trilogy while I was pregnant. Being pregnant felt like a joke, or a horror film, or an occasionally hilarious horror film. I told That Guy I didn’t think there could really be a baby in there. I said I was going to give birth and it would be a pillow, or a mongoose, or something. (If you slept with a mongoose… he began threateningly, but then concluded that the baby would have awesome snake-fighting abilities). But the book felt real, and more importantly, controllable. Writing was so much more fun than looking for crib sheets on amazon and obsessing about how life-as-I-knew-it was about to end.
When my baby was two months old, he only took naps if I put him in a wrap, on my body, and swayed. I put my computer on the kitchen counter, turned out the lights, turned on the fan for white noise, and wrote 300+ pages, standing and swaying and standing and swaying while I typed. It was about a group of teenagers who could dream things into reality. I’m quite pleased with the first four chapters, but the decline of the novel maps out the decline of my baby’s nighttime sleep and the seizing up of my back and shoulders as he got heavier. It’s hard for me to look at it without reading my own mental / physical collapse between the lines. I finished it, amazingly, and put it away. I think I just needed to be writing. Something, anything. I needed to know that I could do it, would do it, no matter what.
When I was pregnant with my second son, I wrote a novel-draft about a sixteen-year-old spy in a fantastical version of early 20th century Paris while my first son napped (now in a crib, bless him, and sleeping through the night too). It came out like a torrent, and while it was and is still very much a Shitty First Draft, it worked, and I knew that with more work (a lot more work) it could be good.
Writing a first draft is like falling in love. It’s fun, and there’s not much at stake, not yet. The revisions are the real work of the relationship, the staying after that initial glow has worn off, the commitment to building something worthwhile out of whatever your passion has brought into being.
I’ve got rewrites to do. Lots. I’ve got unfinished things to finish. But, oh blog, I’ve got some notes, too. An outline, really, if I’m honest (which I am, on occasion). A group of characters I know so well, with others still waiting to be pulled into focus. All that stuff that feels like pulling a sled to the top of a steep hill, and from here it looks like smooth unmarked snow all the way to the bottom (even though it isn’t of course, there are rocks and tree stumps hidden in that snow). I’ve been doing purely revisions for over a year now. Over a year! And it’s NaNoWriMo, after all! So while I don’t expect to finish even a shitty first draft of anything this month, tomorrow I’m opening up a new file, and writing chapter one at the top of the page. Whoosh.
Yours, with some revision,
Catherine
So it turns out that November is NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. I am not taking part for lots of reasons and non-reasons but mainly because while I’d like it to be possible, there is just no way I am going to produce however many words you are supposed to produce in a month during naptimes. Anyway, the idea is that you write like crazy and produce, in a month, a draft of a novel. That can freak people out if they think they are supposed to produce a good draft, but as the wonderful Anne Lamott says in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” first drafts are almost always shitty. In a chapter reassuringly titled “Shitty First Drafts,” she writes:
“I know some very great writers, writers you love and who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
So, that’s good to know. The first draft is just getting the story on paper. Worrying about quality is what revisions are for, and from my experience so far, the revision process takes much longer and is much harder than the first draft. If my life allows for it, I’d love to do NaNoWriMo one day (which, as a number of people have pointed out, should be called NaNoDraMo – both for the rhythm and for accuracy, it’s a draft you’re producing, not a novel). I love writing first drafts. Writing the messy thing I will never show anybody. Getting the story down, and not worrying (yet) about whether it is any good.
The first novel-length draft I ever wrote was (is?) called Another Dance for Amaterasu. I was living in a small apartment on the edge of Tokyo with my oldest friend. I was toying with some ideas for a murder mystery set in Tokyo, since riding the trains every day made me feel murderous and I thought I ought to make some use of all that otherwise useless anger. Then, somewhere (I don’t remember where) I read about a sleep disorder in which the sufferer goes into REM sleep but is unable to go on into deep sleep. Because they are only ever sleeping lightly, people with this rare disorder become utterly exhausted, and they dream whenever they sleep. In the article, a man was quoted saying he was so tired that his dreams began to seem more vivid than his life, and he would sometimes doze off and begin dreaming while walking to the bus stop. I thought: Amazing story idea! And then, because I am not entirely heartless, I also thought: Poor guy, that must suck. I started to write about a young Canadian expat in Tokyo whose waking life and dream life were blurring and bleeding into each other. It was a jumbled mess of too-many-storylines and Japanese and Greek mythology, Orpheus and Ame no Uzume shrugging at each other across the pages, wondering, what are we doing together in this scrambled attempt at a book anyway? It didn’t work. But that first draft? Pure joy. I wrote it at home, in cafes, in parks, on the subway. I loved my characters. I still love those characters, and am sorry to have given them such a confused, confusing, fragmented story to live in. If I learned anything, it was that I am a writer who needs to outline. In detail.
The second novel that I finished became Shade & Sorceress, my first published book. I was stuck with Amaterasu. If the first draft was a gleeful sprint, the revisions were a slog. I wasn’t making it work. I needed a break. I decided to write a fantasy story for my niece and nephew. It was meant to be a Christmas present, a fun little novella. I came up with the premise ridiculously quickly, and started making notes. The first thing I wrote, in a tiny room on an oil processing ship in China’s Bohai Bay (what I was doing there is a whole other story), was a conversation between my heroine Eliza and her nemesis, Nia. The delight of writing something new, of finding new voices and a new story that wasn’t the stuck story, was exhilarating. The novel flew out of me, the story kept on growing, and by the time I had a draft done, I had outlines of the next two books.
I drafted the sequel in Princeton, New Jersey, in a claustrophobic grad student apartment. It felt like my only real escape from my should-I-get-pregnant-do-I-really-want-a-baby-no-that’s-a-terrible-idea-I-definitely-don’t-want-a-baby-what-the-hell-would-I-do-with-a-baby-except-I-really-do-want-a-baby-and-how-did-we-end-up-in-New-Jersey-anyway crisis. The fun was in working with relationships between already developed characters. I didn’t need to introduce them, or introduce them to each other. I didn’t need to set anything up. All that work had been done in the first book, and the second book felt like the payoff.
I wrote a draft of the third book in the trilogy while I was pregnant. Being pregnant felt like a joke, or a horror film, or an occasionally hilarious horror film. I told That Guy I didn’t think there could really be a baby in there. I said I was going to give birth and it would be a pillow, or a mongoose, or something. (If you slept with a mongoose… he began threateningly, but then concluded that the baby would have awesome snake-fighting abilities). But the book felt real, and more importantly, controllable. Writing was so much more fun than looking for crib sheets on amazon and obsessing about how life-as-I-knew-it was about to end.
When my baby was two months old, he only took naps if I put him in a wrap, on my body, and swayed. I put my computer on the kitchen counter, turned out the lights, turned on the fan for white noise, and wrote 300+ pages, standing and swaying and standing and swaying while I typed. It was about a group of teenagers who could dream things into reality. I’m quite pleased with the first four chapters, but the decline of the novel maps out the decline of my baby’s nighttime sleep and the seizing up of my back and shoulders as he got heavier. It’s hard for me to look at it without reading my own mental / physical collapse between the lines. I finished it, amazingly, and put it away. I think I just needed to be writing. Something, anything. I needed to know that I could do it, would do it, no matter what.
When I was pregnant with my second son, I wrote a novel-draft about a sixteen-year-old spy in a fantastical version of early 20th century Paris while my first son napped (now in a crib, bless him, and sleeping through the night too). It came out like a torrent, and while it was and is still very much a Shitty First Draft, it worked, and I knew that with more work (a lot more work) it could be good.
Writing a first draft is like falling in love. It’s fun, and there’s not much at stake, not yet. The revisions are the real work of the relationship, the staying after that initial glow has worn off, the commitment to building something worthwhile out of whatever your passion has brought into being.
I’ve got rewrites to do. Lots. I’ve got unfinished things to finish. But, oh blog, I’ve got some notes, too. An outline, really, if I’m honest (which I am, on occasion). A group of characters I know so well, with others still waiting to be pulled into focus. All that stuff that feels like pulling a sled to the top of a steep hill, and from here it looks like smooth unmarked snow all the way to the bottom (even though it isn’t of course, there are rocks and tree stumps hidden in that snow). I’ve been doing purely revisions for over a year now. Over a year! And it’s NaNoWriMo, after all! So while I don’t expect to finish even a shitty first draft of anything this month, tomorrow I’m opening up a new file, and writing chapter one at the top of the page. Whoosh.
Yours, with some revision,
Catherine
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