I Spy with My Critical Eye: Trusting Your Inner Writer

Writing a first draft requires a unique set of skills. All month, we’re asking authors to look back on their past first drafts… and the lessons they’ve learned from them. Today, Alan Averill, author of The Beautiful Land , shares how he learned to trust his own vision:

First drafts are funny. People generally assume that the poor author will have to spend the next few years mining through the dreck to pull out one little nugget of goodness. And sure, I suppose it can be like that, but I don’t think it’s a general truth. Instead, I think writers just don’t trust themselves enough to realize that first drafts are often much closer to completion than they know.

So it took me about four months to write the initial draft of my first book, then another six weeks to get it into what was more or less the final form. (And yeah, that’s pretty speedy, but I wasn’t working at the time and cranked away at it for hours every day. Unemployment! Who knew?)

I’d guess that at least 80% of the first draft is in the final draft. The typos are all gone (I hope) and I cut a bunch of stuff that wasn’t working, but the heart of the novel—the backbeat—is pretty much as-is from the initial draft.

And I’ll be honest: this worried me at first. Because I’d heard all the stories about how writers had to agonize over their drafts and kill their darlings, and here was this book I’d barfed out in five months that I thought was pretty good. 

It was weird, you know? I felt like I’d missed some crucial step and the book was actually terrible, but I was too dumb to realize it. (And yes, there are probably people who read it and thought exactly that, but that’s okay. There’s always someone who doesn’t like a particular creative endeavor. It’s just part of the deal.)

The book went on to get published, people seemed to enjoy it, and I’m really happy with how the whole thing went down. I learned to trust my instincts and my work, and believe that what’s coming down on the page in the beginning is close to what the writer in the back of my brain wants it to be. 

Trust your work. Trust your initial vision. Don’t look at your first draft as something that needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the chassis up. Instead, find that backbeat and fill in the details around it. Because I think the best stories are ones that come from the gut, and if you approach that first, purest vision as something easily thrown away, you could end up losing what made it really cool in the first place.

Alan Averill is the author of The Beautiful Land. He’s also written and localized dozens of video games, including Nier, Fire Emblem Awakening, and Hotel Dusk. You can find him on Twitter @frodomojo, where he tends to talk about games, writing, and the never-ending tire fire that is the Seattle Mariners.

Photo by Flickr user purplejavatroll.