First Draft Blues
Someday, I promise myself, someday I will sit down and write a book. No more of that first draft falderal. Sentences will glide from my pen, arriving fully-formed like Athena. Beginning. Middle. End. In that order. The project will take exactly three months. The first reader will be an agent, who will declare my book a tour de force, a masterpiece. I will be hailed a genius. Money and awards will follow. Most pointedly, I’ll believe, for five straight minutes, that I can write.
This from one who realized on her fourteenth draft of her current work in progress that given the details of her opening paragraph, she had essentially started her novel with “It was a dark and stormy night.” I can only be grateful I caught the faux pas before I sent the manuscript out. Again. Merciful my muse might be, but here at my desk, I slumped, indulging once again the voice telling me I’d failed.
Being too hard on myself is far easier than imagining a resolution to the story problem. From the first draft forward, that’s all writing demands—resolving story problems. The realization of how many problems I’ve not yet located lays the foundation of my insecurity.
That “not good enough” voice kicks in hardest when assessing an innocent first draft. Being ego-driven, the voice has only one opinion: You’ve done me wrong. Ego loves to wail those first draft blues.
If I don’t believe in the viability of my first draft, how am I ever going to stick with my alleged three-month one-draft project when it hits its fourteenth draft in year five?
Ego declared my first drafts to be nothing but messy scrap yards of half-broken ideas and incomplete dreams layered together with no real form or meaning. But what if I were to stop looking at those beginnings as bad by default? What if I could see their rich potentials and playfulness? What if (gasp!) my ego had failed me?
A first draft offers an authentic representation of what I needed to say in that moment. Not pretty, not organized, not even readable, a first draft presents an unedited report from my deepest mind. It provides a candid snapshot of what I really thought and felt, loved and despised, my values peppered with notes-to-self about groceries.
Its rag-tag existence might be cause for celebration rather than shame. A thing of joy even when chocked full of regrets. Like the musical blues, a first draft captures one person’s truth of being alive. Can a first draft have problems in terms of conveying literate narrative to others? Hell, yes, story problems galore but resolving story problems is a writer’s job description.
Our negative receptivity toward first drafts worries me because it embeds the ego’s voice in the writing. To write any draft to its fullest potential requires a lot of faith in the material, in the writer’s own abilities, and in the stubborn determination to get it right. If I don’t believe in the viability of my first draft, how am I ever going to stick with my alleged three-month, one-draft project when it hits its fourteenth draft in year five?
To resolve story problems, I must first have them. What more could I ask for than a big, deep-diving, problem-riddled, potential-rich and playful first draft?
Writing Exercise
Find one of your first drafts for a project big or small. Without editing, copy a page or two of the original text you wrote—either by hand or on a keyboard. Sit with it a while. Write then about the first-draft page(s) you copied. Use only positive comments or praise. This can be in any form you wish from prose to poem. The only rule is no qualifiers such as I felt I could make something of this. If doing so is difficult, try writing in the third person.
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