{"id":2659,"date":"2013-02-22T16:51:42","date_gmt":"2013-02-22T21:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=2659"},"modified":"2013-02-22T16:51:42","modified_gmt":"2013-02-22T21:51:42","slug":"still-more-on-bad-first-drafts-because-yeah-they-take-a-while","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/still-more-on-bad-first-drafts-because-yeah-they-take-a-while\/","title":{"rendered":"Still more on bad first drafts because, yeah, they take a while."},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I was writing along today, minding my own business, when an atrocious scene came spilling out of my fingertips.\u00a0 I kept thinking, No, this is too gross!<\/em> And Ouch!<\/em> And I can\u2019t put this in a book for kids!<\/em> And then I kept writing it anyway.<\/p>\n

Who knows if this painful, cruel scene will make it into the second draft, let alone the final?\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0 But it\u2019s there now, where I can squirm at it, and it certainly led to some interesting choices for my main character.<\/p>\n

Since my last post, I\u2019ve been hearing from fellow writers who second-guess their way madly through their first drafts, too.\u00a0 A teacher friend tells me she is bringing Anne Lamott\u2019s Bird by Bird<\/a><\/i> bit on writing shitty first drafts<\/a> into her class, and I feel this warm, vicarious sense of being known. \u00a0I recall how Paolo Bacigalupi abandoned a complete sequel after Ship Breaker<\/i> to write the companion novel The Drowned Cities<\/a><\/i> instead, and I recall that Kristin Cashore also labored over and abandoned a complete novel before she turned instead to what would become Bitterblue<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

These stories fortify me.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to forget, when we read published novels that are all deep and polished, that they were probably once unwieldy and messy.\u00a0 Even if we\u2019ve seen the slow, grudging transformation in our own work with previous novels, it can be hard to have any faith in the first ugly baby draft that spews out on the page.<\/p>\n

\"February,

February, and many Earthlings resist the urge to hibernate.<\/p><\/div>\n

I say, let us have faith.\u00a0 Let us keep doggedly onward.\u00a0 I know it\u2019s February and we all want to hibernate and rewatch Downton Abbey<\/a><\/em> over and over, but the explorations we\u2019re undertaking with these raw first drafts will be worth it in the end.\u00a0 They will yield to revisions, or they will prove themselves dead ends that will in turn push us onto something better.\u00a0 The only way to get there is to write what we have to write today, even if it\u2019s freakishly hideous and inappropriate and, dare I say, bloody.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s write today.\u00a0 Let\u2019s get those dumb words on the page.\u00a0 Onward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I was writing along today, minding my own business, when an atrocious scene came spilling out of my fingertips.\u00a0 I kept thinking, No, this is too gross! And Ouch! And I can\u2019t put this in a book for kids! And then I kept writing it anyway. Who knows if this painful, cruel scene will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-2659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2659"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}