Don’t stop writing until the curtain falls
I am getting closer. It’s so close I can almost taste it…. in six weeks or so. That’s how long I am aiming to finish my rough draft. I am in the last ten chapters and almost to the third act. Marathon of the middle is no joke. Being so close yet so far has allowed me to start considering what the editing process is going to look like and what I plan to do with the ugly hunk of clay that will be my first, complete draft. Part of me is worried about how much work there will be. But at the same time, I am glad that at this point, I have done almost no editing.
Lemme explain. Some people like to edit as they write so when the draft is done there is less work to do for the next one? Perfectly logical right? Right! It is logical. But I am not a logical writer, so if logic is what you expected from me, there’s the figurative door!
Are they gone? Good, for those of you that remained, thank you for indulging in the bit. My first draft is ugly, like I am going to be embarrassed if people read it ugly. There are dropped plotlines, pointless info dumps, and long flowery paragraphs of description and exposition that are all going to feel my wrath once I get to editing. So, why not go ahead and git ‘er done? Well, I, like most writers, have a hard time switching between creating and editing so if my drive is to write more, then editing is not the way to go. There are two reasons that I have refrained from editing during the first draft.
The first is that editing makes me overly self-conscious about my writing. As I have said before, the ease of writing comes and goes and when it really goes, then it can feel like I am just putting down words to fill space. There have been times in my process when I had no idea how to communicate something naturally and opted to create a long monologue of information so I would know what I was going for the next time around. Going back and editing these sections would have required a lot of time, time that felt better spent moving forward rather than looking back. Not only that, working through them before I finishing a draft, would have (and still does to a small degree) made me question my ability as a writer. As a first time author, it can feel overwhelming to see the pages that didn’t come from those periods of inspiration. They fell amateurish and like an indictment of the gap between me and more successful writers. But I cannot compare myself to people who are not in the same place as me. Giving the writing time to breathe will allow to come back with clear intentions and a complete vision of what the book will become. Which brings me to my second reason.
In a previous article, I mentioned that I mix creating outlines with letting the flow of writing take me. While I am in the weeds of a chapter, that second one really comes into play and I find myself trying to paint a picture of what that scene or dialogue is trying to communicate. When I finally come up for air, I look back and notice I may have created a great scene or discovered a new facet to my characters that I hadn’t considered. However it often has no support from earlier in the book at best, or directly conflicts with something previously written. Rather than taking the time to go back and rework everything written to reflect where I ended up, it makes more sense to me to press onward. Along these same lines, I would hate to put in the work to beautify a passage or cement it narratively when it won’t even make it past a first read through.
So my words of wisdom for today? It’s a lot easier to kill your darlings if they are ugly and when you have the momentum to keep moving forward, keep going. There is always time to come back and fix mistakes. If you have read this far, know that even if I don’t know you, I appreciate you.
