So, you’ve made it past the dreaded blank page and you’ve put some words down. You’ve completed some paragraphs, then some chapters. Maybe you’ve even completed the first draft and the book is there, in some semblance of what you had imagined. You should be pretty happy with yourself, maybe even pretty proud of the accomplishment; many fall at all the hurdles that lead to this moment and you persevered.
But maybe you aren’t happy or proud. Maybe you’re disappointed, frustrated, perhaps even disillusioned. Early drafts can be punishing and troublesome, there is no doubt about that. You’re putting something you’re passionate about, something you might even love, down onto the page but it’s often far from smooth-sailing. With self-doubt, tricky characters, the words not flowing the way you were sure they would, plotholes arising that you hadn’t envisioned, completing a draft is full of all these moments that can derail your project completely. There is a lot of beauty in writing, a lot of beauty in putting those early thoughts onto a page, but it can sometimes feel like a battle where you emerge with bruises and scrapes.
Sometimes you have a vision for something and it’s not coming out exactly as you had planned. You might write some sentences you think are pretty foul, you might need to leave blank spaces to come back to later for scenes you haven’t quite planned yet. The draft might be a combination of fully fleshed-out chapters and bullet points that you’ll embellish when you’ve got it better pictured in your mind. First drafts, and early drafts in general, are often amalgamations of ideas and plans that don’t always take a full form until much later, and that isn’t always the easiest thing to get through, especially when you’ve often got such hopes for what you’re creating. You have this vision for what it can be, what it will be, but what you’re looking at now is far from it, and that can be disheartening.
How do you manage those early drafts then? How do you persevere when you’re witnessing imperfection upon the page? How do you pick it all back up again when you can’t possibly see how it’s going to get where you want and need it to be?
I’ve mentioned this before but here I am to say it again; the mantra that I’ve always followed is:
It has to be finished, not good.
I believe I first heard the term from C.S. Pacat, a beloved author of mine (though I could be wrong, I’ve been following this rhetoric for so long, I’m not sure I can totally remember the exact time I heard this put into words). Although I might have only heard this term a few years ago, it’s a way of writing that I have been following since I started.
Early drafts aren’t meant to be good. They’re there to be a start, a seed or bud that you need to nourish so it can grow into your vision. If you don’t have anything there to work on, you have nothing to improve. A finished draft, whilst sometimes rudimentary and even unseemly, is the perfect opportunity to improve. If you keep waiting to write the perfect sentence, then I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a long time. Maybe even forever.
But having something to work from, whether it’s a wonky, imperfect, incomprehensible sentence, that’s how you push yourself closer to the finish line. Putting that sentence onto the page shows you what you want to say, even if you haven’t quite refined it yet. It’s so much easier to tweak a sentence, to rearrange the words, to find a thesaurus to get the word you actually want, than to stare at a blank page and hope that you’ll be able to write something perfect the first time; perfection doesn’t happen, but you can get something strong when you work on something weak.
For perfectionist, this will be a particularly hard concept to adhere to. If you can’t write something beautiful on the first try, why bother writing anything at all? The problem with that is things are so rarely beautiful at the start. It’s true that you might write a sentence that makes you feel immensely proud or you come up with a string of dialogue that suits the scene and the characters excellently well or that you twig in the moment of writing for a way to bring everything together later on. More often than not, though, these things take time.
Inspiration does strike and it’s important to take advantage of that, but if you only ever write when you’re at the height of your inspiration, I’m afraid that finishing might never happen. Things that don’t feel inspired can be made inspiring at a later stage, but waiting around for that perfect sentence, that perfect dialogue, that perfect moment of climax, it’s not useful to you. The work that goes into pushing through and getting something down onto the page, whether you’re in love with it or not, that’s what’s useful, that’s what will help you write better and write faster in the long-term; it’s the work you put in that gives you results and, without that work, then you’re not going to have anything at all. So whilst it might be arduous at times, hard work and dedication are excellent skills to have as a writer that will, I promise, reward you one day. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but one day.
And is there not some charm in the rudimentary? In the moment, maybe it’s excruciating to see these wonky sentences and this exposition that makes no sense. Witnessing these moments of weakness are where those bruises come in. But when you go back, when you’re tackling the next draft or perhaps when you’re simply reading your old writing, is there not something sweet about those early editions? Maybe they do make your skin crawl, but I think there should be some charm in what you once wrote; it’s a tangible way to witness your growth and to feel positive about the work you put in so you could get to a stage where you’re editing and rewriting, rather than still crawling your way through the first iterations of everything.
So with these early drafts, simply finish them. Refinement is for the next stage. Don’t linger on making things better or perfect, move forward and know that making it stronger doesn’t have to happen right away. For now, it’s time to get it finished. It can be good later.
Robyn x
R. A. Howard 