Novels and adventurers die like this.įorget what you’ve written. This is like being lost in the woods and deciding to dress up a clearing rather than hacking your way out to open air. They are tempted to improve what they’ve already written instead of pressing forward into the unknown. Sitting down in front of the computer, the writer recoils from the awful empty whiteness at the bottom of the document, and their eyes scroll up to the last thing they wrote. Revising is easier and more appealing than writing new material. I’ve seen this mistake trap far too many a writer. Related to the above, you have to write all the way to the end of your story before you start revising the beginning. Insight #12: Write all the way to the end before you revise your beginning Every day you sit down at your computer and force another sentence onto the screen, you are creating that clay.
The rough draft is that wet lump of clay. You need a wet lump of clay to work with. You can’t sit in front of a potter’s wheel and turn air into a vase. Don’t let anything get in the way of that goal. The most important thing in all of the writing process is to get an entire story down on paper. But that process is impossible if the rough draft doesn’t exist in the first place.
#Rough draft novel how to#
The entire next entry in this series will be about how to revise rough drafts and make them better. I’m going to repeat this, and I strongly suggest that you make it your daily rough draft mantra: Nothing stifles creativity and production like the inner critic who shows up too early. If you take only one insight away from this part of this series, please let it be this one. Insight #11: Your Rough Draft Doesn’t Have to be Good We’ll pick up the numbering right where we left off. I hope to help you through this process as much as I can. The idea for the story is exciting, and the first chapter leaps right from the fingertips, but things quickly bog down. I know many other writers also struggle with their rough drafts.
Revising and publishing are the fun and easy parts. To me, the rough draft is the most difficult part of the writing process. I’m sharing these simply because I think my twenty years of fruitless endeavors might’ve been a whole lot easier if I’d known a few things before I got started. Those insights might not be equally useful to all people, and that same warning applies here as we dive into the writing process. In the first part of this series, I listed some of the insights I wish I’d known before I set out to become a writer.
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