The beginning of my first draft was daunting, an uphill battle I hoped would even out somewhere in the middle — and thirty-something thousand words in, for the most part, it has.
It’s a milestone in the process that I was never quite sure I’d hit. But with a lot of encouragement from good friends, family, and my MA supervisor, I’m here. I look at the word count at the bottom of Scrivener most days and give myself a little pat on the back.
However, I also give previous chapters a cursory glance most days. This is where most of the troubles with my first draft begin.
I’m a solid mix of a planner and, what my university lecturers affectionately call, a ‘pantser’ — I usually have a good grasp of where my plot is going, but I’m equally liable to change my mind and go where I believe the story and characters are taking me in the moment. So, as most novels do, where I started and where I am now are two different places. Not unrecognisable, but noticeably changed.
I’ve found that as my story has adapted, I’ve wanted to go back and bring the rest of my manuscript up to speed. I want it to feel whole; I don’t like the first part, I do like the second part, thus I should adjust the former to my current taste. This – in addition to the crippling reality that the my first draft is not an art form, but the worst example of my ideas on a page – can make the urge to edit hard to resist.
So I have done and, against my better judgement, continue to do so. Once, twice, three times, more. At various stages of the narrative I will find something I don’t like and pause the forward movement of my novel to go back, in an effort to make things right. It’s find it almost instinctive at this point.
I cannot speak for everyone’s creative process (we are all very different creatures and I imagine a lot of people are far more disciplined than I) but creatively, this is my achilles heel. The upset it causes me to know that my whole manuscript as is is not fully harmonious, impedes me from making progress time and time again.
I realise that unless you are the rare and exhaustively organised kind, no writer has it planned out by the word from start to finish. Indeed, part of the joy of the craft is finding the novel as you go along; pointing a torch into a dark room and discovering something new; driving in the dark at night and finding your way but he headlights. But it can also be infuriating, if you want to see everything all at once. And at certain points, I most definitely do.
I’ve realised that the only real way, for me at least, to be able to see everything at once, make the whole thing harmonious, will be to have the whole first draft finished. And the only way to do this is to actually finish it.
With myself and the rest of my family in self-isolation at the present, and a good plan for the next part of my novel on paper, I’m going to do my best to press on until it’s done and not touch a single word prior to the chapter I find myself working on. I’ve wasted so much creative energy on retrospective editing.
When I well and truly find myself lacking any motivation to write new words, when my old friend Writer’s Block visits, I might revise a few things to keep on track. But it’s made me realise that, at least while some progress is being made, I think the best thing I can do for myself is to restrain the urge to go back when I should be forging onwards.
The Writing Process 