THE SHITTY FIRST DRAFT

I’ve talked before about how planning, thinking and researching can play as important a part as writing when it comes to progressing your novel. But there is also that thing known to all of us who aspire to finish our book, and that thing is called procrastination.

So, when all the genuine thinking and planning and researching are done, how do you resist all those other things that stop you getting on with writing your book? How do you make sure that weekly word count increases?

I’m in that very situation right now. Pandemic pessimism has got in the way again, and it’s drained my creativity. I’ve tried to keep in touch with my book by jotting down ideas and bits of dialogue, so I haven’t divorced myself from it completely. When I get down to writing every day I hope those notes will help me make good progress, but I wish I had managed in the first place to practise what I am preaching to you.

There are many reasons not to get down to work. If you are an unpublished novelist it’s all too easy not to take your book seriously. Other things on the ‘to do’ list take precedence, or you baulk at giving yourself permission to spend time on something that, in frequent episodes of self-doubt, you think will go nowhere. Stop thinking like that. Carry on with that attitude and you’re setting yourself up to fail.

It might be especially hard just now in the time of coronavirus. The pandemic is affecting us in ways that sometimes we don’t even acknowledge. So if you feel there’s a deeper reason that you’re finding it hard to write, cut yourself some slack. Take a day or two off, and try again. Don’t take this strange malaise as a sign your book is no good and should be abandoned.

However, the absolute truth of the matter is you have to write every day. Aim to put something down on the page, even if it’s only fifty or a hundred words. Sometimes I’ve looked at a day’s work and thought, well that was a waste of time. But I don’t delete it; I leave it for next time and even if the writing is not up to scratch, often I’ll find that the germ of an idea is there, that it’s propelled the plot forwards even if it’s a bit clunky, or there are a couple of good sentences that I can keep. Quite often, once I’ve edited and refined that ‘bad’ bit of writing I’ll make up for it the lack of word count by writing a bit more. It starts to flow again. When a bad patch lasts a few days, I try to remind myself it will all even out in the end.

When I manage to write daily, what it does for me is keep me in touch with my characters, the plot, the setting. Some weeks, when life is challenging, I might only have added a few hundred words to the running total, but my book is still a living thing. A few days away from it and I’m out of the zone and I find it difficult to break back in.

Brigid, Katherine and I have talked about this and while we all have different ways of working, we agree that you’ve got to keep at it every day – planning, researching and thinking is included in this exercise – if you want to keep up momentum.

Some people set themselves a daily word count. Others plan a chapter at a time, to be written over the course of a working week. Some set a date for completion of the first draft and work towards that date. Then there are those who set a regular time every day and start writing for a designated period. It might be an hour, it might be longer. And some people write until they reach an important plot turn, then stop, so that when they resume the next day they have an exciting point from which to launch.

An American novelist friend introduced me to the concept of the shitty first draft. You have to give yourself permission to get this down on paper, knowing it’s not as polished as you would like, because without the shitty first draft you will have nothing to edit, nothing to show for all your thinking and planning.

Don’t let that perfect novel remain unwritten in your head. Nobody will ever read it. Better to breathe life into the rougher, unpolished gem, which you can hone and send out into the world. Aim to write every day. And even if you only manage 50 words, it’s 50 words in the right direction.

I’m going to turn those scribbled notes made during the last couple of weeks into a sizeable section of my next chapter, so I’ll be at my desk tomorrow morning, adding to the 500 words that has not increased for too long. It’s time for my word count to start progressing again towards those two magic words: THE END.