How I Finish First Drafts

I have been writing for a very long time. Since 2006 when my best friend showed me her Teen Titans fanfiction and made me want to be a creator instead of a consumer. Between then and now I have finished four first drafts, if you don't count a book of poety that might never see the light of day, and of those three were within the last 12 months.

Somewhere along this journey I seemed to have figured out something, how to finish a first draft. You might not like what I'm about to say, but here it is. Stop editing as you go. Seriously, in a first draft you should not be editing, you should be writing. This one is hard, those red squiggly lines of failure always bug me. But if you stop to fix those, soon you're fixing a chararacter description, then you dabble with the pace of the scene, then how it fits into the novel... It doesn't end. I set a limit, squiggly red lines only. Then I get to pretend that I edited and keep going.

Outline. Ouch, I know, another thing everyone tells you that tends to get ignored. I'll be honest though, I enjoy pantsing a novel more than writing from an outline. I like letting my characters have the reigns and seeing where it takes me. So I have found a glorious middle ground. I write a plot outline in the form of jot notes, quick and not detailed. If you get too detailed then it takes forever and you might as well write a snazy outline. My latest story had one page of jot notes for all my characters; their backstory's, their descriptions, their main goal. Then I had five pages of jot notes for my plot. Basically I dump all my thoughts onto the page and don't touch it until I need to add something, and when I do, its in the form of quick jot notes.

Next we find the time. I'll be honest, I do a lot of writing at my day job. I have a lot of spare time there and I'm very grateful for that. I also participate in the 5 am writers club. I get a solid hour of writing done early and squeeze in as much as I can elsewhere. I'll jot notes down while eating supper. I'll forgo the TV unwinding time and look at my story to see if I was missing anything.

Lastly we power through the doubt. This is hard. This is probably the hardest part there is. I'm not just talking about the self doubt, which is bad enough. I'm talking about the book doubt. Is this really unique? Should the character really be doing this? Would they really do this? These questions are hard, and you can write them down, but you need to ignore them. They will make looking at your documents crippling. They will force you to stare at a blank screen. They are not really important yet. What's important now?

Are you having fun?

That's it. Because if this isn't fun for you, why are you doing it?

If you found any of that helpful, or want to tell me how silly I'm being, leave me a comment, drop me a note, send a pidgeon carrier. Let me know how you manage to finish your first drafts.

See you on the flip side,

JC