When Page Totals Go Backward

Not every step goes forward. (Deep, I know.)

It’s nice to see pages adding up, especially in a first draft. A writer can’t resist doing a little math and thinking, “If I can just write 5 pages today and every day this week, I’ll have 25 by Friday. I’ll have 50 by the Friday after that. I’ll have an entire draft before I know it!”

It sounds SO appealing, but the problem is, writing doesn’t often obey math, and expecting words to appear in tidy chunks can make a girl feel like she’s failed when the pages don’t appear on schedule. For me, going backwards and actually deleting pages seems to prove I’m not a writer at all.

But that’s not the case.

I’m here to argue that sometimes going backward is exactly the right thing to. Sure, I need to get a complete draft before I can head into deep revisions. That is definitely the goal. But when I try to go forward and I end up in action for the sake of activity or a conversation that simply spins on air, sometimes stepping back gives me the clarity to see I’m heading in the wrong direction. At times, a draft becomes stalled and ornery because it’s becoming the wrong book. It’s trying to tell you something.

This deep balkiness is different from regular-grade, horribly hard writing.  Of course, writing a first draft depends on understanding that a lot of lousy, fruitless ideas are going to emerge along the way. We have to have a high tolerance for bad ideas at this point. It’s right to invite them in and pat them on the head for now. Yet, if the book is truly, seriously going off track, and we find it no longer has any conflict or direction, it’s okay to admit it. It’s okay to stop and ignore the internal taskmaster who is demanding a page quota. It’s fine to take the cursor, go back fifteen pages, turn them all blue, and delete them. Probably we’ll drop them in the CUTS file rather than permanently delete them, but they won’t be there cluttering up our first draft, masquerading as progress when they were a wrong direction.

Let us not chastise ourselves for these deletions. Page-wise, it looks backward, but this is what real progress looks like.