The Thursday! Newsletter 2-1: Let's Not Be Ugly.
Volume 2, Issue 1
In the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, "I'm back, baby!"
Not that I really went anywhere, but I did take a bit more of a writing vacation than I intended. You may have noticed fewer nifty things to read over the past couple weeks but that should change over the next couple of weeks as I get back up to the creative speed I like.
Speaking of creative speed, let's talk about the creative elephant in the room, shall we? NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. Each November, writers set themselves a goal to write at least 50,000 words into a novel. In theory, NaNoWriMo will encourage writers who have always wanted to write a novel but who have had problems with motivation or setting goals by creating an artificial outside goal along with a vast community of fellow writers who can encourage each other and provide a lasting, vibrant community. In reality, NaNoWriMo gives most of us a new an exciting neurosis about our creative habits, an inferiority complex to those writers who aren't novelists, and a deep well of fresh and exciting anxiety to those who occasionally miss a daily writing goal and fall a little bit behind the rest of the pack.
Of course, the goal is to "win" NaNoWriMo by producing most of a real, live novel.
This week's newsletter is mostly for the writers, but you other wonderful creative folks might want to hang in there, because I will have a bigger point. I hope. Honestly, I rarely finish these newsletters as I begin them, so I might not get where I think I'm going at this point. More on that in a paragraph or two.
I'm not really bagging on NaNoWriMo. I think it is, largely, a good thing. The founders had excellent and noble intentions. They want to help people and, so far as I can tell, they have. We have books we would not have had if not for their hard work. The Night Circus was a NaNo novel. So was Water for Elephants. We're better off with those stories in our world. I believe NaNo has done far more good than bad. However, let's be sure that we don't get overwhelmed by the rush of word counts and daily totals and folks bragging about how much they've done and how far they've written. Let's neither be overly discouraged by those who are still working on their outlines for the fourth NaNo in a row, those who just can't seem to get started, or those who got behind then got further behind then bailed out in the first week.
Let's keep our keel even and our hand steady upon our creative rudder. I'd like to talk about writing first drafts. I hope to give you a little bit of help and encouragement to keep you in the writing game. I might even give you something to help you win NaNo this year, if that's what you want. Sound good?
I'll start by saying I can't tell you exactly how to write a first draft you'll like. In fact, most writing advice you'll encouraged will run toward something like "Don't even try to like your first draft. First drafts are ugly, misshapen horrors whose lives must run their miserable courses so you can get about performing the massive cosmetic surgery necessary to make them presentable for any pair of eyes but yours. Write ugly. Don't look too closely. Just finish and then you can fix all the mistakes you will inevitably make." Once you get past all that, you'll get advice like "If you get stuck, just jump ahead. Or begin in the middle. Or begin at the end and write backwards. Or don't worry about being stuck. Make something up and fix it later. Just keep going. Do whatever is necessary to finish, no matter what."
I don't buy it. You may call me a perfectionist if you wish (and I'll concede I have had to make allowances for my perfectionism because I can't fully get rid of it) but I don't think you should simply assume your first draft is going to be a horrid transporter accident that you've had to assemble haphazardly. It is true that a finished story is better than an unfinished story but "finish" is not a sufficient goal to me.
I'd like to lay a new goal in front of you: "Finish well".
That's not all of it, though. I didn't get from a bazillion half-finished stories thrown away out of despair to at least a story and a poem every week in a second. It took time and a lot of shifting beliefs. Let me share with you how I got where I am now and how you can follow along if you'd like.
The first thing I had to realize is that I hated writing garbage. I hated my ugly first drafts. I hated that I couldn't bring the story in my head to life on paper. I hated that everyone's advice boiled down to "this is the way it has to be". Once I realized that I wasn't going to change the way I thought about my written first drafts, I could look for another way to get where I wanted to be. I got there my redefining what I think of as my first draft. This is a little bit sneaky and underhanded, but if you don't tell the Writing Police, I think we'll get away with it. Ready? Here goes.
Your first draft can exist entirely in your head.
Wait now. Think about that for a second. You know all that ugly writing you do? The plot that doesn't seem to hang together? The characters who don't work well together? The awkward motivations and out-of-nowhere events that push things along on rails? You can do all that in your head, bit by bit, chapter by chapter. I write all my stories and poems in my head. That is, I know pretty much who is involved and what's going to happen, at least at the beginning. I have a good starting event to my stories or a theme to my poems. I know their structure (more for the poetry than the stories, though I do like my stories to have a structure before I start filling in the details). By the time I break out my pen and notebook, I have a pretty good idea how things are going to go. That doesn't mean things go exactly the way I want. Quite often, I'll find myself shifting the story as I write so that I don't end up where I thought I would when I started. That can't happen for me, though, if I'm writing "ugly". To borrow the Hiker and Path analogy I like to use, I can't start blundering down a barely-visible footpath and end up somewhere good. I need a little mental preparation. I need to make a map of the coming terrain in my mind -- even a rough map will do -- so that my steps are more confident. Confident steps give me even more confidence to move from the path I thought I might take onto another path with my head up and my stride steady. I can't get there if I'm worried about stumbling along a strange path from the very beginning.
The other thing that means, though, is the thing I write isn't my first draft, but my second. I can say it's my first draft (and often do, to make myself feel better and, more importantly, to fool that part of me that hates ugly first drafts). Really, though, I'd done all the ugly work in my head with a few scattered notes so I don't forget the important bits.
By the time I'm done writing down that "first draft", it's awfully close to where I want it to be. I've finished my story and I've finished well. I have more confidence when I start to edit that draft that 1) it's already a good story, and 2) I won't have to edit a lot. I can't tell you how much better writing has gotten for me once I ditched the notion that I had to write down an ugly first draft. I didn't. You don't either.
But wait. I did forget a useful little step here. Don't write your novel all at once. Write in bits. Work out the basic story from beginning to end. Write that down. That's your big path. Don't worry if it's not a complete, flowing narrative. This isn't a first draft so much as it is a series of signposts to point you from beginning to end. What you write now will change, a lot. This is the story the way an excited child would tell it. Here's a person and then this thing happened and then they did this and then this other guy did that and then the first one did this thing and, oh, that other guy is this, and...you get the idea. You're putting down story beats, which you'll need to do because when you write your first draft in your head, you'll only be writing from beat to beat. Basically, you'll write a chapter at a time in your head. Work in small chunks, so your brain can handle it all. The additional benefit is you'll better remember what you've done before because your brain won't have to handle the entire novel all at once. Your story will feed into your memory one connected bit at a time. I hope that made sense. it makes perfect sense in my head!
Okay. That's it. Thanks for sticking with me through that hiatus and for the wonderful notes of encouragement. I'm WAY behind on writing back to a couple of you. For that, I apologize. I'll get there. I will!
Next week, maybe let's expand on our creativity a bit and talk about making a good process instead of worrying so much about the result. Hey! I just previewed next week's topic? That's new! I hope I remember to do that consistently! :)
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What I Wrote Last Week
"How to Get World Peace, Probably" is a poem about world peace, breakfast, and maybe more.
"The Janitor" is a story that outgrew its space limitations and surprised its author. I'm not sure I've written anything quite like it before.
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One Last Thing
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