Fiction, from the First Draft Forward: Put Down the Pen and Step Away from the Manuscript

By L.L. McKinney

Last week I made a promise of sorts to utilize one of the methods listed in the article on ways to combat writer’s block. Let’s get that out of the way before delving into this week’s topic, which believe me, is a good’un.

As I explained in Bridge the Gap, I am in the middle of another first draft, and I’ve run into a bit of trouble. My protagonist has found out a big secret, and I’m trying put down the proper reaction. I know my character up and down, left and right, but I was worried about his response being too muted or too over the top. I literally sat for weeks staring at the same sentence, willing something to come forth, but it wouldn’t. Then I used the method called Problem Solving. I won’t go into detail here (If you want the nuts and bolts of what happened you can shoot me an e-mail at Tangynt@gmail.com) but the long and short of it is, it worked! I not only got past the scene, but I also finished the entire chapter, and even moved on to the next one before I stopped for the night. I’ve used the Alternate Scene method before, and now I can say I have personally tried two of the four prescribed techniques and met with success.

Right then, on to the main event! This week we battle another foe often faced by writers. This enemy is more prominent and, in my opinion, more deadly than the dreaded block. It kills the work of many fledgling writers within a few chapters, or even a few pages. It is the evil Early Revision, and the only weapons we have against it are resistance and determination. When we start our stories, more often than not, we’ll wind up with what we feel is a solid beginning down on paper. Then we’ll take this beginning and show it to friends, family, anyone who will sit down long enough to read it. Small issues will be pointed out, typos and missed punctuation, and we go to fix them. That’s when the Early Revision’s poison sets in. We correct our mistakes and show others our revised material. Uh-oh: a few more problems we didn’t notice before are pointed out. We fix those. This time we find other plot holes or grammar issues leading to more corrections. We go back and forth until it becomes a vicious cycle. What’s the danger here? We allow days, weeks, months to pass without making any true progress on the story. Books are more than beginnings-- there has to be a middle and an end, and if we never get around to either of those, we never have a novel.

I spent years scratching out opening after opening, and now I have a notebook filled with hundreds of pages and not a single, cohesive story in the whole mess. I fell victim to the Early Revision. I was so focused on perfecting what little I had that I missed the point of writing to begin with: to finish the whole story. I wish someone had come along sooner and taught me this bit of obvious knowledge. Writer’s block may be an annoyance in the process, but, in my opinion, Early Revision is more detrimental. It’s up there with the excuses we give ourselves to not write at all, something I discussed in an earlier article. The more we go over portions of an incomplete manuscript, the less time we spend on finishing it. It’s a waste of effort and time, especially when one considers how much cutting will be done at the end. Early Revision tempts us to polish pages we may delete from our stories as early as the second rewrite!

I did a lot of Early Revisions with Swayed, too. (This gives you an idea of how long it took before I knew better.) I wrote my first few chapters, took them to my writers group to get feedback, came home and fixed everything I was told need correcting, and then took them to the next meeting. Rinse and repeat over the next three or four meetings. Four whole months passed before I got around to continuing my story. The worst part? In that amount of time I found tons of new inspiration and ideas, which was wonderful, but in order for any of it to work my so-called perfect beginning had to go. You can imagine my displeasure.

From then on I refused to get in my own way like that ever again. I wrote, I took new chapters to my group, I got feedback, and I fought the urge to immediately start fixing things (unless it was something big like mixing up character names or eye colors). My goal was to write a book, a whole book, not a few pretty pages or a couple of nice chapters. I was determined to change, so I had to resist my old ways. When I stopped bringing in my revised chapters it surprised my writers group, but they were happy to see new material and I was happy to provide it. When they asked about the change, I explained that there would be no more revising until I completed the first draft and started the second. They were impressed by the show of self-discipline. A few of them even admitted to struggling with the Early Revision bug as well.

Get the story down then make the corrections. It doesn’t come out glittering like gold, sure, but it’s a first draft and first drafts are, frankly, supposed to suck. It’s the natural order of things; birds gotta’ fly, fish gotta’ swim, first drafts gotta’ suck. One of the best things we can ever do for ourselves and our work is put down our little red pens and step away from our manuscripts. Making Early Revisions is like icing a cake while it’s still batter sitting in a pan; it ruins it when you get around to sticking it in the oven.

“Don’t get it right, just get it written.” - James Thurber

Happy writing!

L.L. McKinney is a freelance writer, a published poet and a playwright. As an active member of First Tuesdays and YA Lit Chat, she is currently seeking representation for her young adult paranormal urban fantasy, Swayed.