Why I May Never Write a First Draft on a Computer Again

Everyone’s writing experience is different. This month, we’ve asked past NaNo and Camp participants to write letters from the other side of their experience. Today, Courtney Montgomery, a former NaNoWriMo intern, shares the one simple change she made that helped her finally complete a first draft:

NaNoWriMo is about throwing words at the world, regardless of sense or reason. It’s about liberating oneself from quality or the pressure to create “perfect” works of prose. It’s learning how to abandon the Inner Editor and plunge headfirst into the act of writing.

And I felt incapable of doing any of that. I may never write a rough draft on a computer again.

Rough drafts are delicate creatures, fragile and easily spooked. Yet even knowing this, I could never leave them alone during the actual writing process. Editing should be reserved for a completed draft, but I would needle and pick until my drafts-in-progress became nothing more than patchwork caricatures of themselves. My poor drafts and I could never move forward and I would eventually abandon them for greener pastures (all the while thinking I must be the worst writer to have ever lived).

But this year? This year, I decided to write my story by hand. I was going to write it linearly from beginning to end (exceptions being whenever I felt like defying that rule, which was often and with great enthusiasm) and I was not going to edit or erase. I was just going to keep going.

That was the key: no edits, no erasing, no second-guessing. Main character’s personality completely changed? Keep going! Forgot to introduce the villain four chapters ago? No matter! Make a note of it and keep going.

All throughout my month of writing, I carried my little noveling notebook with me. It followed me wherever I went, like a cheerful familiar or dark specter hanging overhead (depending on the day). Any time I had five minutes to spare, I made myself write a sentence. Any time I had a bolt of inspiration, my notebook was there to catch it before it slipped, ephemeral, through my fingers. 

My noveling notebook came with me when I went out in the world and from room to room when I stayed inside. My novel came with me to work for lunch breaks. It came with me to bed. And, when I didn’t feel like writing, it was there to hang heavy in my periphery and force me to write another fifty words anyway.

Drafts two and three and seven and twenty I will type. Those drafts will live and breathe in my computer and on the cloud and wherever else novels should be stored for maximum redundancy. But I am achingly grateful to my Past-Self for deciding to write this year’s first draft by hand and keep every piece of it in the same notebook. Because different scraps of paper get lost and words on a screen are too easy to erase.

NaNoWriMo is for you. It’s for all of us. Whatever tools you use, whatever methodology works for you is amazing. Voice record your novel, type it, paint it, handwrite it—do whatever it takes to tell your story. For me, I think I’ll stick to pen and paper. But however you create, know that the world is better for having your story in it.

Top photo by Flickr user EcoVirtual.