Tag Archives: first draft

Interregnum…

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Most people who write never actually talk about how much their first drafts suck. Since I clearly have no shame, I’ll say it out loud and in a public forum: I know for a stone cold fact my first draft sucks. It’s legitimately awful. It’s full of spelling and grammar issues. It’s likely to have favored words and phrases repeated every few pages. There are whole sections that I’ll want to rip out, stomp on, and never think of again. That’s the nature of a first draft. As much as we’re tempted to think of it as the beginning of the end, it’s really just the end of the beginning.

My tendency, and I can only assume it’s shared by others, is to want to launch a new project out into the world as quickly as possible. Of course this is a terrible, terrible mistake because it doesn’t give you the time and space necessary to really work out the kinks and rough spots. Since I know that going into it, what I’m planning on doing now with this short story is absolutely nothing. I don’t want to re-read it. I don’t even want to think about it for at least two weeks. A month would be better if I can convince myself to stay away that long.

Time and distance is the only thing that helps give a layer of objectivity when I get back to a work in progress. For me at least, if I try to edit my own work just after it’s finished, I know I’ll do a lousy job of it. Being too close to the story, I’m reading what I think is there (or maybe what I wish was there), rather than the words that are actually on the page. Really editing your own work is mostly a fool’s errand. That’s why the best editors can make a boatload of money plying their trade. Those of us who can’t afford the best editorial support, simply make do by asking trusted associates to take on the job for peanuts. Frankly, if you’re interested in more than a free copy of the finished product, I probably can’t afford your editorial services at this point anyway.

So where I am now is in a bit of an operational pause, somewhere between active writing, re-writing, and editing. Since I’ve built up a good head of steam and have forced myself into the habit of writing every night, though, this isn’t the time to lay in the cut. My job now is to keep writing, even if that means taking on another project or maybe doing a little freelance work to keep my chops up. I’m tinkering with a few ideas and even managed to free write for a while last night which is something I rarely ever get the chance to do.

Whatever small project I take on during this damned interregnum, you can rest assured that it will be in some way geared towards continuing to build my little hobby into something a bit more substantial. This may never been what I do to pay the bills, but I’m still fairly certain it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

The hardest part…

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With much respect for Tom Petty, I have to tell you that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that the waiting is the hardest part. As far as I can tell from personal experience, it’s the writing that regularly threatens to knock your teeth down your throat and beat you into a bloody pulp of submission… But hey, maybe that’s just my perspective.

PressDoing a day’s work with your brain is exhausting. It’s naturally a different kind of exhausting than baling hay or digging a ditch, but it’s still an activity that will leave you mentally spent at the end of the day. Normally, I’d recommend making sure to take the time to mentally recharge, rest, recreate, and relax, but when you’re in sight of the end, the only thing your exhausted brain wants to do is keep pushing ahead. Even with your eyes glazed over, your brain wants to drag you across the finish line. Or at least across the first of several finish lines you need to get past.

I realize the last two paragraphs probably read like gibberish. In this one instance, I’m going to be OK with that. You see, I’m two chapters away from being able to call what I’ve been madly typing away at for months a First Draft instead of just another Work in Progress. Trust me, that’s an important distinction if only to the guy behind the keyboard. It means that in maybe a week or two the first draft will get its first full length read through, polishing will start, and then it will make its way to several people who have graciously agreed to read a first draft that’s sure to be full of grammar, punctuation, usage, style, and myriad other problems. Then it’s more polishing, revision, cover design, formatting for e-publication, polishing, developing sales descriptions, publication, figuring out how to leverage jeffreytharp.com to sell ebooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and trying to wrap my head around whether it’s worth putting a book of snarky observations into a dead tree edition.

Two thousand or so words now stand between me and where I want to be. This isn’t the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end… but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

A look behind the curtain…

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As a fresh college graduate back in about 2001, I remember having a series of conversations with a few other newly minted professionals wondering why nothing we learned in college actually prepared us for working in a “real world” professional environment. As I recall, the group consensus was that some kind of handbook for new graduates would have been incredibly helpful in making from the transition from full time student to productive member of society. None of us took up the banner at the time. I think we lumped it into same category of conversations that ended up with us wanting to open a brew pub, build a working trebuchet, and buy a rental cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Of our brilliant ideas, the only one that ever came close to seeing the light of day was building the treb – even though we never did manage to figure out how to attach the sling mechanism to the throwing arm, we managed to put together a respectable first effort at medieval siege weaponry.

Those first random conversations about the idea of a snarky little field guide for new grads has kept popping back into my head from time to time. After going to work for Uncle, there seemed to be a limitless supply of cautionary tales I wish someone would have told me before I showed up for my first day. I don’t know that it’s anything that would have changed my career trajectory, but it’s a stack of information that would have fit well into that “nice to know” category before needing to learn some of those life lessons the hard way. I have a few insights that might be useful for those coming up behind me and I like to think I give it enough misanthropic twist to keep the narrative interesting even if you’re not well on your way to a career as a office drone.

For the last few months, one of the projects I’ve been working on behind the curtain has been a first draft of what I suspect is becoming the handbook we first talked about more than a decade ago. I’ve said it here before, but it’s worth saying again: Serious writing is damned hard work, but it’s some of the most personally rewarding work I’ve ever done. That’s probably because it’s one of the few things I’ve ever written purely for my own purposes. Hard as it is to believe, spitting out well-crafted information papers and memos just doesn’t leave me with the same warm glow of self-satisfaction.

If I had to give it a SWAG, I’d say that at 13,000 words I’m probably halfway to having a very rough first draft. I’m shooting for a 25,000 word first draft with the vague hope of polishing that up to about 30,000 words in its final version. Maybe it’ll be ready by summer, maybe it won’t, but Summer 2013 is where I’m really hoping to land this thing as a well dressed ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’m feeling pretty good about hitting my “half draft” mark yesterday, so if there’s any interest, maybe I’ll post up a sample chapter so you can see how I’ve been misspending a big chunk of my evenings and weekends.

Banging on the keyboard…

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I think it’s safe to say that among anyone who writes either professional or as a hobby, there’s a general consensus that first drafts suck. They suck badly. Reading the first cut makes you want to shred everything you’ve done, start again from a blank page, and get it right this time. Then you take a deep breath and remember that then that would be your first draft and it would still suck. The only way to get past the suck is to finish the first draft, even if you know it’s full of holes, inconsistencies, and dialog that reads like English is your second language. It’s a vicious cycle, I tell ya.

The fact is I’m nowhere close to even the draftiest of first drafts. What I’ve got are eight chapters more or less vaguely connected by the slightest strand of plot. With enough time and attention that might be just enough framework to build a halfway decent story. Because I’m nowhere patient enough to wait until I have 60-70,000 well sculpted words, I’m adjusting the target in order to declare victory in small doses.

In the Victorian era, novels were published in small segments and often appeared in magazines before the entire novel was printed as a standalone volume. Using the past as a guide, my new target is to craft a story in four or five major sections and release each serially as they reach a satisfactory level of “done-ness.” With e-publishing, that seems to be a perfectly common way of doing business. And let me tell you, 15,000 coherent words are a hell of a lot easier to string together than 60,000 of even the most rambling, nonsensical words you can imagine. It doesn’t hurt that you can sell each individual part of the serial as well as the final product – $.99 per segment, $2.99 for the whole, buy the set and save 25% off the serial issue price. Yeah, I think that’s the ticket.

Some writers, it seems, are blessed with inspiration. I’m not one of those lucky few, but what I lack in inspiration, I more than make up for with sheer determination to throw words against the page until they stick in some semblance of order. Just think of me as a million monkeys randomly banging away at the keyboard. Eventually I’m almost surely going to stumble my way into Shakespeare territory… although I’d settle for Suzanne Collins or Stephanie Meyer’s neighborhood, too.