First Drafts are for Scribbles

First drafts can be the beginning of something beautiful, but they themselves aren’t meant to be beautiful.  They are meant to be scribbles.  They are meant to be raw.  They are meant to make you cringe a little.  One lesson that I have learned over the past few years is that the single most important thing you can do to make progress is to get words on paper.  Ugly words, misused words, misspelled words.  Sentences that make you a little embarrassed.  Somewhere in that tangled mess will be the words and ideas that will make up your final draft.  But you simply aren’t there yet.  Here’s a quick run-down of how to use scribbling to unleash the genius that resides somewhere inside.

The first draft is for a free-flow of ideas.  When you start on your work-in-progress, your mind is hopefully full of a lot of ideas.  If it’s not–you may want to find a new topic.  Those ideas have some loose connections, some strong connections, some notion of a beginning, middle and end.  Sometimes the story that is inside is so incredibly profound to us that we don’t want to mess it up by writing a sloppy first draft.  The emotions are so real and the connections so intriguing that we want to do our ideas justice. But at this point, our ideas are just ideas.  And they need to be captured before they get away.  Capture them.  Write crappy chapters.  Leave out all of the beautiful connecting language and nuance that is your own personal style.  Just get the ideas on paper.  It will feel yucky.  That’s okay.

Stories grow and evolve as we write.  And that’s okay too! The perfect story you hold in your mind will evolve once the pen hits the paper.  It was meant to.  Let it grow and let it expand.  If you write a tight first draft that doesn’t allow for growth as your story develops, you will either be too confined to let creativity flow and breathe life into your story, or your editing process will be painstakingly difficult.  Both are no fun.  Remember that a lot of time will pass between the writing your first chapter and your last–your own concept of the story will change just as the process of writing will cause your story to evolve.

Refine your scribbles during the in-between moments. One trick I have learned is that it’s best to have lots of different types of work to do while working on your draft.  Some days we just wake up ready to write, others we don’t.  And some days we have time we can put aside just for writing, but a lot of days we won’t.  When I am facing writer’s block or when I only have a few minutes here or there (my famous “in-between” moments), I like to have some type of meaningful work I can accomplish.  Lots of times this looks like going back and developing out some of the chapters that I know are only the 50% solution.  I add in description or narrative.  I try to take the basic elements of the chapter and enhance them– make a tense situation more suspenseful, or make a sad scene gut-wrenching, or make a silly scene hilarious.  These are the moments where you will connect with readers and those parts of your story deserve that one-on-one attention from you.  And, best of all, since you scribbled everything down in your first draft, you have a clear starting point.  One other activity for these in-between moments is to insert notes into your chapters about things that you have to go back and update in order to make certain elements of the story work.  These tags are oftentimes your sparks–the subtle changes or moments of genuis that draw out nuances of your story and draw in readers.

Second, third, fourth, etc. drafts are for you.  After you have scribbled down your thoughts and put together a story that at least makes logical sense, it’s now time to add your unique style, humor, experience, touch to the work.  Use these follow-on drafts to breathe the life into your story that only you can do.  After the first draft is complete, it’s fair game to start asking questions from potential beta readers.  You can float a couple of chapters out there for feedback.  Test your audience.  But this is the time to start to refine, to finagle, to agonize over words.  If you are anything like me, you will rewrite every chapter at least once, so that first draft doesn’t deserve too much attention to detail.  It will never see the light of day–it’s just a springboard.  Because I know that that first draft is so far from the final draft, I have learned to scribble away and look for those moments of spark that will (eventually) become the most important aspects of my story.

Until next time, keep scribbling.  (Really…just scribble.)