First Draft Complete – What do I do now?
Posted by Matt Uhrich
Photo by rich115I sat at Panera the other day having typed the final period of the first draft of my novel and thought, what now? It felt incredible to be finished. I looked around to see if anyone was giving me a thumbs up or applauding—no one was—what an outrage. With the expected feeling of accomplishment was an unexpected pang of loss. For six months I've worked on this story almost every day—put all my effort into it—been obsessed with it. What am I going to do with myself?
First things first—I'm going to take some time away from the manuscript (calling it a manuscript makes it sound more impressive—you may use that trick). I think I'll be able to read it more critically if I'm not so close to it. I find if I read something I've just written, I can't see any other way to write it. I'm hoping to avoid that.
During that time off—probably a month or two—I think I'll do some reading on the craft of writing. I'm looking at Elements of Fiction Writing - Description by Monica Wood and Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field. While I'm doing that, I still need to be writing so I'm going to work on a short story and see how that goes.
At the beginning of 2009 I made it a goal to write one chapter of a novel. That goal was neglected and forgotten until July when I found the story idea I had been looking for. For years, I've kept a list of story ideas as well as notes on the ideas. The idea that eventually became the story I've written was developed over a month of note taking. It changed drastically from day to day until it finally got to the point where I started writing. And once I started writing, the story just kept coming. My worries that I would be unable to get past 10,000 words and 20,000 words faded as I found myself at 40,000 words, 50,000 words, and beyond.
As I got used to the writing process, I found what worked best for me was getting the story out as quickly as possible—not worrying about writing the perfect prose. Once I started doing that, the words came much more easily. We'll see how I feel about it when I start editing. Vonnegut mentions this method of writing as well as the inverse method in Timequake.
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.
We won't talk about the next paragraph where he mentions that most men are bashers and most women are swoopers.
I'm excited to begin editing. It will be my first experience with editing a work of this length. I expect it will take as long or longer to edit than it did to write. I'm also feeling some measure of dread at the prospect of going back and reading the draft. I worry it will be so bad I will be scarred for life from the horror of beholding it. I don't think it's quite that bad, but you know how it is when you read your own work, it's like trying to judge your children's athletic ability or intelligence—of course they're the best athlete/smarted kid in the world.
I've been neglecting this site while I was working on the first draft—at least that was my excuse. I don't have that excuse now, so I'm hoping to have more frequent posts. If my past record is any indication, more frequent posts are unlikely. People who can generate a high quantity of content and make it interesting and/or useful are amazing to me. Anyone can vomit out gobs of boring self-indulgent drivel—even me. If I work hard at it, perhaps it's a skill I can develop like an exercised muscle. And if I'm the only one who reads no one will get hurt either way.
Cheers.