While intoxicated.Ĭhapters I actively HATED while writing have ended up being some of my favorites, ones I’m really proud of. Think of it as a brain surgeon operating on herself. When you’re in the middle of writing a first draft, you have NO idea what’s good and what’s not. The best you can do is have faith, take a leap, and write the next chapter. You will never have absolute confidence that what you’re doing is right. Second, every writer sits down and faces her/her fear every damn day. First, there’s no such thing as perfect, and chasing that is a fool’s game. So it’s better to obsess over what we’ve got and make it perfect, right? This project, whatever it is, is important to us and we don’t want to screw it up or look like an idiot. And when pressed, we’re always going to go for the easy out when we’re afraid. It requires less mental and emotional sacrifice. It’s ridiculously easy to get sucked into polishing, worrying over every word in the first three chapters instead of pushing forward and writing chapter four. Why? Well, there are a few forces at work. To quote Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap!” Fixing is quicksand that looks like an oasis. The point is to keep making forward progress. I prefer to use the sticky note feature in Word and leave my future self notes about what needs to be corrected. Some writers keep a running Word doc of all the changes they need to make in the second draft. If you get to page 100 and realize your main character should really be a double-amputee war veteran with survivor’s guilt instead of a prom queen with daddy issues (um, wow), make a note of the changes required for earlier chapters but KEEP WRITING with your veteran as the lead instead. But don’t stop until you’ve got something that’s vaguely story-shaped. That’s exactly what drafting is supposed to be. You can have schizophrenic characters, plot holes aplenty, and rambling notes to yourself everywhere.
Or, at the very least, a beginning and an end.
Don’t go back and “fix” (or quit) until you have something resembling a draft.
Here it is: Write all the way to the end. It’s something I wish I’d known from the start. (Can we talk about how frustrating “Write what you know” is? Gah.) But one piece of advice-with a single addendum-has made all the difference to me.
Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of writing advice.
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