1/13/2024 0 Comments Novel rough draft exampleIn the beginning, it’s like a honeymoon! You feel all the emotions. Writing a book is like having a relationship. This is because you are in the beginning of a book affair. How excited are you when you first start fleshing out a story? How amazing does it feel to start naming your characters and setting up their scenes in your mind? Fan-freaking-tastic. Strangely, there is a raw emotion that comes from writing something so fast you don’t have time to noodle it to death. That first draft is possible if you pick yourself up by your metaphorical bootstraps and do the work every day, but a large percentage of writers never cross the finish line. “Will I ever finish this book?” they ask, fists raised to the sky for dramatic effect. A malaise sets in, often slowing a writer down to a crawl while they chip away over a long time and often give up entirely. Nothing kills a book faster than never finishing that initial draft. “Writing a book is like having a relationship.” Why is that? Isn’t it counterintuitive that the chapters written in a whirlwind of typing be the best? I’m glad you asked, nebulous reader voice in my head. I wrote the lion’s share of that book in six days, and those chapters were by far the best in the book. I went away to a writer’s retreat and forced myself to write as much as I could every day. It wasn’t until I decided I really needed to finish my novel, I Once Knew Vincent, that I decided to shove my face in the cold, scary, deep end of the writing ocean. A first draft took me over a year to complete. I would write a chapter, go back and edit it, and then proceed to the next one. I used to be just like you because I was led to believe novels should take years to write. Most of them are exercises I’ve stolen from other writers. I’m not magical I’m a binge writer, and none of the ideas in this article are uniquely mine. But if you really want to knock that rough draft out of the park, I’m going to ask you to kick that notion to the curb. Many people find this the best way for them to consistently write draft after draft. Sounds like a line you’ve heard before, right? Yeah, me too. I’m telling you that you can do this, too. Though I am intensely proud of this accomplishment, I’m not telling you this to brag. My experimental novella, Tattoo, was written in about three weeks. Wrote the first draft of my historical novel, Hour Glass, in sixteen days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |