Chapter Ten

Fun with First Drafts

“I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they’d like to have. I want the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third, and fourth drafts.”
—Judy Blume

There are two kinds of writers: those who love writing first drafts and those who hate writing them. Writers who love writing first drafts usually hate editing, otherwise known as subsequent drafts. Those who hate writing first drafts usually love writing the subsequent drafts, because once the dreaded first draft is finished, they have something to edit.

Okay, there are three kinds of writers, if you count the people who hate first drafts and subsequent drafts. Why these folks don’t just toss their laptops into the Seine and take up investment banking is beyond me. They’d have a lot more fun and almost certainly make more money.

No matter which type you are, you still need to face the blank page and finish your first draft before you can move on to red lining and cutting and pasting those first-draft pages, which are, blessedly, already filled with words, for better or worse.

Note: If you think that you need only one draft, think again. Everyone needs an editor—and you are your own first editor. But we’ll talk more about that after we get through the first draft.

The Kitchen Sink

“The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.”
—Jennifer Egan

When it comes to getting that first draft on paper, the only real rule is: whatever works. For some writers, that means outlining every single beat of the story before they sit down to write the thing.

When I first started writing long-form works, I never outlined; I wrote my first novel without one. Of course that novel never sold, but it was good enough to get me an agent. It also garnered the attention of an editor who read it and eventually approached me to write a novel for her—but she wanted an outline for that project before she’d give me a contract.

I wrote an outline for her, but it was terrible. Or, at the very least, it was wildly incomplete. Certainly the document I gave the editor was not detailed enough to win me the contract, but I was determined. So I struggled through four more drafts of that outline, refining the story, zooming in closer and closer to the action until I had a scene-by-scene playbook. And then I zoomed in again, writing out the beats of each scene as well. This was an exhausting process; I found it very difficult to build the story brick by brick without actually writing it. But I did it, mostly because I followed my editor’s advice: “Go big.” By which she meant go for broke in terms of drama.

My editor also strongly advised me to take Robert McKee’s Story workshop, the infamous screenwriting seminar immortalized in Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation. The one and only Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay for Adaptation, which was inspired by his commission to write a film based on Susan Orlean’s bestseller The Orchid Thief. Suffering from writer’s block, Kaufman ended up writing a hilarious meditation on art, commerce, and the writer in Hollywood instead—turning his humiliating failure to adapt The Orchid Thief into cinematic gold. Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper have a field day in Kaufman’s dark romp, which also features Brian Cox as Robert McKee, imperious guru of the commercial script.

When I saw Adaptation at a small art film house in Danvers, Massachusetts, I laughed harder than anyone else in the audience—because I was the only one who’d actually been to McKee’s seminar. Cox nailed McKee. But don’t get me wrong: I learned a lot from McKee about structure, writing cinematically, and more, and I always recommend his workshop and Story, the book he based on that workshop, to writers. Including you.

Between my editor’s crash course in outlining novels and McKee’s seminar, I learned what I had to learn about creating a beat-by-beat story structure to write a novel on commission. But like Kaufman, I didn’t much like it. And I never did it exactly that way again.

Now my process is more like this: I come up with a concept, a premise, and an opening scene, and I fill my sketchbook with ideas and images and jottings too obtuse to be called real notes. Then I write the first couple of chapters. Fifty pages, tops. By then I have a better sense of where I’m going—and I sit down with my index cards and brainstorm sixty to one hundred scenes. I put them in a loose order, and I start writing. These index cards become, in effect, my outline.

And as I write, I toss in everything but the kitchen sink. Because I know I need to go big, go for broke, pull a Charlie Kaufman. Because I can always edit it later. And I will.

Make Your Own Rules: The Plotter

“You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.”
—John Irving

In the world according to storytellers, there are plotters and there are pantsers. Plotters revel in writing those beat-by-beat outlines. Plotters use index cards and software programs; they create storyboards and maps and family trees. For a plotter, beginning a novel without a road map would be as unthinkable as driving cross-country without a GPS. And just as stressful.

You may be a plotter. You may have to work out the entire story in advance. Many mystery writers do this, figuring out the real story of the murders so they can rework it in a way that misleads the reader. Mystery writers have two storylines to juggle—the one they tell the reader and the one they don’t—so plotting it all out beforehand is, for many, a necessity.

Perhaps the ultimate plotter—and one of the best-selling writers in the world—is J.K. Rowling. Rowling spent five years building the world of Harry Potter and plotted out each of the seven books of the series before she wrote the first one. To say her preparation paid off is putting it lightly. We should all be so prepared.

But you don’t have to be a mystery writer to be a plotter. Perhaps, like John Irving, you can’t write the beginning until you’ve determined the ending. Irving claims to write his best-selling novels in reverse, writing the last line first and then writing the line before that, working backwards for a while, until he truly understands the ending.

For plotters, knowing where the story is going in advance frees them to write that story with abandon. If you are the sort of person who likes to make lists, plan your vacations ahead of time, and buy your Christmas presents year round, you may be a plotter.

The good news: Agents and editors will love you because you’ll be able to provide the synopses they need to contract the stories you haven’t written yet.

Be Prepared to Plot

As your career moves forward, the ability to create and write to an outline becomes increasingly important. I have a client whose first novel I sold in record time in a substantial multi-book deal. Like most first-time novelists, she’d had years to write this first book, but now she was faced with producing two more novels in her science fiction series on an accelerated schedule. She had only nine months to write each subsequent story. She had ideas for these two books, which I’d pitched as part of the deal, but these short blurbs were all she had. She hadn’t outlined the first novel; she had just winged it. She wrote the second book, winging it as well.

Second novels can be challenging to write, given the pressure and the time constraints, neither of which the writer has had to deal with before. This “second-book syndrome” makes editors—and writers—nervous, with good reason. The publishing landscape is littered with the careers of novelists whose second books have failed. The critics seem to have it out for second books, whose reviews are often less than stellar, if not outright pans. That said, the criticism can be deserved, because the writer chokes and the book is not as good as it should be.

Second-book syndrome can hit creators of trilogies particularly hard. The middle book of any trilogy can be notoriously tough to write. Middle stories are in effect the second acts of the trilogy, and like the second acts of individual stories, they can be problematic. They have to build on the promise of the first book, set up the action for the climax of the last book, and still be entertaining and engaging enough to stand on their own. Science fiction and fantasy writers must also live with the world-building choices they made in the first book. Consistency is key.

For my client, the second book proved a struggle. The editor wanted a lot of structural changes. She wrote a second draft of the second book, but the editor was still not satisfied and called me in to help. We brainstormed a new structure for the novel, and my client created a new outline for the second book. She rewrote it quickly, and the book was recently published on schedule. I’m happy to report that the novel has now been nominated for a major literary award—a rare achievement for the middle book of a trilogy.

I tell you this story because even if you are a pantser, there may come a time in your career when you need to think like a plotter, like it or not.

No Rules, No Worries: The Pantser

“I am a hopeless pantser, so I don’t do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I’ll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I’ll worry about untangling it later. I’m glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.”
—Marie Lu

If you resist rules, including your own, you may be a pantser. You just sit down and write, making up the story as you go along—by the seat of your pants, as it were. You proceed in good faith, confident that whatever happens, you’ll make it work. And most of the time you probably will.

If you are a pantser, you’re in good company. A surprising number of best-selling writers do not outline. Even those writers who create big series and complicated worlds often eschew plotting in advance of the writing—including the likes of George R.R. Martin and Diana Gabaldon. Many mystery writers, for whom tightly plotted stories are a genre requirement, also do not plot. I did an informal survey of a few of my mystery-writing friends and clients who do not plot—and count Hank Phillippi Ryan, Hallie Ephron, James D. Shannon, Dick Cass, and Michele Dorsey among them. (They all claim that my book Plot Perfect is converting them—but I’m not sure I believe that.)

Storytellers who write character-driven stories may place their characters on the stage—and then let them improvise their way through the story. Some writers simply begin with a given situation, put their characters in that situation, and let ’er rip. This approach can work very well for these writers, particularly those with high-concept stories. Other writers simply daydream their way through their stories.

If you’re a pantser, then pants away. But do it with the understanding that sometimes you will pants yourself right into corners or begin stories that you simply cannot finish. We’ve all heard about the novels that writers abandoned when they realized halfway or more into the story that the book was simply going nowhere—and there was no saving it. Most pantsers have at least one abandoned novel in a drawer somewhere.

The Happy Medium: The Plantsers

Best-selling author Claire Cook, one of my favorite people and a role model for maneuvering through the new publishing landscape, says that pantsers and plotters have more in common than you might think. Most plotters acknowledge that sticking too closely to an outline, however well detailed, may keep them from recognizing and capitalizing on the happy accidents that can occur along the writing journey and bring a story to life. Staying open to such unexpected developments is critical; surprising yourself means surprising the reader, to paraphrase Robert Frost. On the other hand, most pantsers admit that at a certain point, they need to stop, take a step back, and look at the story as a whole, reviewing where they’ve been and where they’re going.

Both approaches to the first draft—plotting and pantsing—are valid; each has its admirers and detractors. But in the end, or by the end, as the case may be, you may find that a combination of both methods is what best gets you through that first draft. Which would make you what my client Kate Defrise, author of such delightful novels as Christmas Chocolat, calls a “plantser.” Well, first she said “plonsters,” unaware of the little monsters on the children’s TV show Plonsters. So we changed it to plantsers, which I like even better because it implies a certain organic growth.

The Finish Line

“I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.”
—Will Self

The most important rules for writing a first draft are these:

1. Whatever works.
2. It takes as long as it takes.

Whatever you have to do to get through your first draft, do it. Plot it—or not. Pants it—or not. Follow a trail of index cards, or pour out your story on the page willy-nilly. Write your first draft in longhand on yellow legal pads at dawn before work, or dictate it into your smartphone on your commute, or type it on your laptop every evening after the ten o’clock news.

Whatever works. The trick is to get the story down, from beginning to end. Because the people who get published are those who: (1) finish and (2) revise. Finish your first draft and you are halfway there.

When I wrote my first book, I realized that I couldn’t write it in one long spurt. As a journalist, that’s how I’d written my longest stories; I’d sit down with all of my research and interview notes and pound out the story in one extended session. But I couldn’t write a book in a day or a night or even a long weekend. I had to learn to break up my story into chapters and scenes and beats, and commit to finishing at least one a day until I reached the end.

Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re a sprinter, then you’ll need to master some of the marathoner’s tricks before you set out on your journey. Otherwise you will hit the wall and fail to cross the finish line. Here are some strategies that might help:

• Write every day. Every day. You need to stay in the story; if you stand apart from it for too long you will find it hard to get back into the rhythm again.
• Write at the same time every day. This way you’ll train yourself to return to your story at the stroke of 10 P.M., or when your alarm rings at 6 A.M., or when your kids go to bed at 8:30 P.M.
• End your writing session while you’re on a roll. This was a trick Ernest Hemingway used; he believed that you should stop for the day “when you are going good and when you know what will happen next.” That way, you can slip back into your story the next day.
• Reward yourself when you meet a benchmark. If you are the sort of person who responds well to rewards—chocolate, concert tickets, new shoes/skis/suits—then build rewards into your writing schedule. As I write this chapter, I’m propelled by the prospect of my next reward—dinner and a movie with a writer friend whose book deadline is the same day as mine. Every 10,000 words, we take what Julia Cameron calls “an artist’s date” together. (More about these in chapter fourteen.) It’s fun—and it works.
• Give yourself a writing vacation. Sometimes you need time away from work, family, friends, and the distractions of home to get traction on your story. Go. Alone. Write. I’d been working on my first novel for years and found myself engaged to a very nice man before I managed to complete the first draft. I was determined not to get married before I finished it. So I checked myself into the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Nye Beach, Oregon, for a week. Named after the beloved patroness of the arts who opened the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, this beachside landmark bills itself as “truly a hotel for book lovers,” and it is. Rooms are named after and have décor inspired by specific writers; I stayed in the Alice Walker room and the Willa Cather room. There are no phones or TVs or Wi-Fi in the rooms, but there are books everywhere, and the top floor is a library with overstuffed chairs that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. I finished my first draft there and married that very nice man three months later.

When none of these strategies work, and you find yourself staring out the window and not writing, or writing words that don’t seem to lead anywhere, or getting lost in your story with no way out, just keep showing up and writing. As my friend Rob told me, it’s all part of the process. When Rob wrote his first novel, he spent a year at his desk starting stories that went nowhere, until he realized that he was just finding his way into the story. He didn’t know how to write a novel—it was his first one—and he was figuring out how to do it. “All those fits and starts,” he told me, “were all the same novel. I just didn’t know it.”

“I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.”
—Colm Tóibín