First Draft Woes

If your writing feels hollow or empty, the best thing to do is fill it out. But how do you do that? I would like to share the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten (which was in a martial arts class) to answer that: If you fix your mistakes in the beginning, you won’t need to correct them later. For a writer, the beginning is the first draft, so that is where we will work.

The conventional wisdom of writing is to write too much. The idea is that it is far easier to cut out material than it is to add more in. I support this method, but I think it deserves more explanation as to why. Consider what it means to write too much. It means you explained the location too thoroughly. You write about the action too much. You explained the characters too deeply.

The only way you can write too much is if you know your story so well that it is a real experience for you. This is a good thing. When you know a story so intimately that you can tell it the way you tell stories that happened to you, you guarantee that your story is complete and believable. As an audience member, I may not need two pages dedicated to describing the clothes that a man on the subway was wearing, but if you know them that well, then I can be sure that your character will act accordingly.

When you write too much, you have to cut it back. That doesn’t necessarily mean cutting scenes out, though. Sometimes it just means telling your story more efficiently. That’s not too big of a deal. It’s like a puzzle. What sentences add to your story (building the world, generating interest, telling the action)? Which ones take away from your story (unneeded detail, boring sentences, stale scenes)? This is what editing is all about!

The problem with not writing enough is that it generally means the opposite of what I just covered. It means you don’t know your world well enough. You don’t know what is going on. You haven’t told enough story to be a whole story. When you haven’t written enough, it means you have to create more, and that is the hardest part of writing. If you are ever writing and you are just not sure if you have enough or if what you have is good, trust your gut.

People are generally pretty perceptive of the quality of their work – they usually just ignore that voice in their head that tells them when something is wrong. Don’t ignore the voice. When that one sentence just doesn’t sound right, there’s something wrong with it. If some passage or explanation doesn’t sound completely reasonable, you know there’s something wrong with it. More importantly, when something is wrong with your writing, other people will notice it, too.

Whenever I write, I give my first draft to a reader. A good reader is hard to find, but if you can find somebody whose opinion you trust and whose ability is adequate, hold on to that person as long as you can. The interesting I have noticed about having people read my writing is that they catch every part that my mind told me was wrong. A good reader won’t let substandard work slide through the cracks.

These are going to be the most helpful tools in getting over your first draft woes. Aside from that, all I can say is make sure that you have a story that you are dying to tell and that you know it better than anybody else does.