Still more on bad first drafts because, yeah, they take a while.

So, I was writing along today, minding my own business, when an atrocious scene came spilling out of my fingertips.  I kept thinking, No, this is too gross! And Ouch! And I can’t put this in a book for kids! And then I kept writing it anyway.

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

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

These stories fortify me.  It’s easy to forget, when we read published novels that are all deep and polished, that they were probably once unwieldy and messy.  Even if we’ve 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.

February, and many Earthlings resist the urge to hibernate.

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

So let’s write today.  Let’s get those dumb words on the page.  Onward.