Throw It Out

Say you get a really great idea for a story. You sit down and start writing your idea so you don't lose it. As soon as you begin, though, your mind hits overdrive and keeps giving you idea after idea. You write and write, elaborating on characters and actions. The plot develops, moves along, and before you know it, you've written down your whole story. Well, it's not the whole story, but it's all the major stuff that happens from beginning to end.

Now what? There is a lot to fit in. Some scenes you described in a paragraph, but would require several chapters to fully cover. Much of the bits that show characterization, the dialogue, the proper portrayal of the scenes, all need to be filled in. So where do you begin? Do you take a generic sentence and expand it until it's the right size? I suppose it might work on a logical level, but it would be far from seemless.

I see the first draft like an old car. You buy a junker for cheap, fix all the things that are wrong with it, and when you're done with that, you have yourself a shiny car that's good as new. Here's the problem with first drafts. In general, they are so beaten up and broken down that they're not much more than a rusted chassis. You would basically be building your own car from scratch. It would be cheaper and easier to just buy a new one.

So, my advice for the first draft: throw it out. The point of a first draft is for you to figure out what actually happens. After that, the draft has done its job and is no longer needed. Personally, I always throw out my first draft (and occasionally several subsequent ones, too) and redo it. It helps me keep a flow of motion, a sound of vocabulary and sentence structure, a mind for scope of importance and scene. Trying to do these broken up into small segments can be very difficult. Hence why I don't try to fix my drafts. It's cheaper and better to make a brand new one.