First Drafts: The Elaborate Excuses

Dear Blog,

I’m not just writing a New First Draft because I am too lazy to revise my spy story. I swear it is not because writing a New First Draft is more fun than struggling to turn a finished draft into something more like a finished book. It is totally not because I have no idea what to do with my finished draft in order to pull it all together and make it something other people might enjoy reading.

Nope. This is my process. (She says, pompously, with shifty eyes that might make you suspicious, if you were that sort of blog . But you aren’t that sort of blog, are you? You believe me, don’t you?).

This plunging on ahead with first-drafting is pretty much how I wrote the Tian Di trilogy. I wrote a draft of the first book. I gave it a quick once-over, sort of like checking for lice and removing extraneous limbs (as one does). Then I wrote a draft of book 2. I revised book 1 a little more – the book-equivalent of combing its hair and giving it a dash of make-up. A gentle snipping and clipping and smoothing of book 2, and then I wrote a draft of book 3. With the trilogy all drafted, I went back into book 1 with a machete and remade it. Got book 2 a new outfit and a dashing haircut. More book 1, ruthlessly. Blow-torching, blood everywhere. A bit of revision on book 3, all kindness here at the beginning of the process: you’re not so bad as you are, just a little touch-up honey, don’t look over there, those aren’t book 1’s guts on the floor, I promise, just don’t look, here, put this in your mouth and bite down if it hurts. Back to book 1, for repairs and rehabilitation, until it looked (and felt!) whole. Then I sent book 1 out into the world, to find itself a home, which it did, at Coteau Books. More blood-and-guts revisions on book 2, between other projects. It is ready for the editor’s knife. And I just finished a rewrite of book 3, but it needs another go-over or five. It also needs to simmer a while. Like soup. Add some ingredients, take out some ingredients (that’s how you make soup, right?). Let it simmer for a year while you make another batch of different soup.

(Why are makeovers, torture and soup-making the best metaphors I can come up with for book-making? I have only ever tried one of those three things, and don’t do it well – I will leave it to you, blog, to guess which).

I am impressed by and curious about authors who write the first book in a series and get it published (or submit it for publication, if they are new authors) before they have written the next book(s). Maybe I just don’t have that much faith in myself. I’m so afraid of writing myself into a corner. I didn’t want the process of writing the third Tian Di book to be bound by unchangeable events or rules from the first. My most substantial rewrites on the first came after drafting the third, and a big part of the fun, then, was in laying tiny clues for what was to come later.

So I am writing a New First Draft… OK, because I am lazy, because it’s fun, because I’m not sure what to do now with my spy story, fine … but I think and hope that more first-drafting will actually help me with the revisions. I’ll learn my characters and their world even more. It’s part of my process. Quit looking at me like that.

Yours, lazy-as-all-get-out and a rotten soup-maker to boot,

Catherine