First drafts serve different purposes for different writers.
I know writers who describe their first drafts as embarrassing, and would
rather die than show them to anyone; I know writers who revise as they go and
end up with a “first” draft that is almost ready to send to an agent. (Note:
almost. I don’t know anyone who sends in a first draft without any
revision.)
I’m between those extremes. For me, a first draft is where
the magic happens: where my characters come alive, the plot become twisty, and
the sense of wonder makes itself felt. If none of that happens in the first
draft, I’ll abandon the draft and, upon occasion, the project. But if it does…
then I have something to work with.
And I do mean work.
My first drafts are complete messes. They tend to be
littered with notes to myself, anything from “think of a better word” to “need
a motivation for her to do this” to “explain stuff about sorcery here.” And
that’s just the stuff I knew was problematic as I was writing. Once I sit down
to revise, I quickly realize that I’ve invented contradictory rules for my
world, one character suffers from a personality change halfway through the
novel, people knew things in chapter 2 that they discovered for the first time
in chapter 10, and I’ve used the phrase “narrowed her eyes” approximately three
times per page.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed when I realize just how full of
holes my manuscript is; but now that I’ve been through the revisions process
several times, and realize just how much my draft is going to change along the
way, I know better than to panic. The important thing, for me, is not to start
in on the manuscript itself – at least not right away. Instead, I create a
couple of new documents, which might include: (1) a timeline, (2) a
character-motivation chart, (3) a list of over-used words (I actually have a
semi-permanent one that I use for every manuscript – I tend to be a repeat
offender), and (3) a compilation of various scenes where I need to make sure
the descriptions/information is consistent. And most importantly, I make one of
these:
This chart, specifically, was made for Nightspell – a novel
told from the point of view of three different people, with the motives and
knowledge of various other people to take into account. Each column represents
what one of my characters knows at every point in the book, and the colored
post-its represent the various plot threads and plans winding through the book.
I got the idea from Lon Prater, a fellow writer and member of my online critique
group. (Diana Rowland, another writer, said she uses post-its on the living
room wall. Maybe when my kids are old enough not to be way too tempted by
that...)
Eventually, of course, I do plunge back into the manuscript.
But with my folder-full of charts and outlines to help me, I find it much
easier to see where my story has gone wrong, and what I have to do to make it
right.
Leah Cypess used to be a practicing attorney
in New York and is now a
full-time writer in Boston. She much prefers her current situation. She
writes adult and young adult fantasy, and enjoys traveling,
hiking, and spending time with her husband and children. Her two
published fantasy books are MISTWOOD, about an ancient shapeshifter
trapped in the form of a human girl, and NIGHTSPELL, about a country where ghosts come back from the grave to solve their own murders.
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