Road Trip Wednesday is a weekly blog carnival hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: What's the biggest writing/querying/publishing mistake you've made so far?
For the sake of my own psyche, let's not discuss the early drafts of my first manuscript that I so proudly forced on others, thinking that minus a few line edits here and there it was "done"? I cringe.
Of course I've also made mistakes querying, typos plague my fourth drafts, and I'm sure I've put my foot in my blogging/Tweeting mouth many times.
Wait, no--let's go back to the embarrassing first drafts. I think the biggest mistake I've made is fighting the idea of sh!tty first drafts. Stay with me, here--I know that sounds lame. But it took me a really, really long time to understand, accept, and embrace those stinking heaps of nascent word-poo. And that was hard, because it made me be a frustrated writer, one who was afraid to be creative and take risks. I had my outline, I was sticking to it, and I would stew over a paragraph for a month if I needed to.
So of course those sh!tty first drafts took shape pretty slowly. And yeah, that's right--they were still sh!tty even if I spent a year writing them.
Now when I'm writing a first draft, I'm still plagued with doubt. But I embrace it. Meh, so what if I look back on this scene and think it's absolutely whackadoo? There are going to be plenty of chances to edit. But all the bad scenes I am writing now are letting me get to the good ones, and from those good ones I'll find what the book should be. Correcting my mistake and learning to love the sh!tty first draft hasn't been (and still isn't easy), but it's made a big difference in how I write and how I enjoy the writing process.
*Does anyone else remember that Sesame Street song?
11 comments:
First books, first drafts...oh my. I'll never forget when my mother-in-law read one of my later books and said, "You've improved so much." It only reminded me of all the crap I made her slosh through in the beginning, thinking it was great :)
You're so right about it being liberating to knowingly write crap...sometimes we have to slosh through a lot of it to get to the good stuff.
I always knew that first drafts weren't meant to be perfect, but that doesn't mean I liked or fully embraced that fact to the point you mention. I'll have to channel you when I start my next project!
Yes, yes, yes!!! I am so there right now. How many days have I pushed myself forward by writing crap so that I can get to the good scenes. And it is crap. But it's a draft. And once I convinced myself that first drafts don't have to be perfect, I felt free AND motivated to write.
Awesome post! PS - whackadoo - LOVE. My wri-be-fri and I say stuff like that to each other all the time.
Eek... I'm still learning to embrace the sh!tty first draft. It's so HARD to know that what you're writing isn't perfect, and then to just keep plugging along anyway. Will I ever be cool with that?!
And yes, I totally remember the Sesame Street song. :)
YES. Learning this lesson about first drafts is so hard. And it's one you honestly have to just learn, rather than getting the gist from someone else's mistake. But like you said, the good news is that all the craptasticness in a first draft is completely, totally necessary in order for an amazing book to emerge.
It took me so long to be OK with the crap that was my first draft. I spend more than a month on the first chapter alone. After that, I realized this wasn't working and tried to not care. It got me through to the end much. much faster, but I still had to constantly fight the urge to notice glaring mistakes at that stage.
Whackadoo is such a great word (and I almost wrote 'whackadoor,' which is, somehow, just as awesome in it's nonexistence)!
It is so important to let yourself have a bad first draft. I learned that the hard way when it took me two years to complete my first novel's first complete draft - I just kept going back and fiddling, or getting frustrated and giving up for weeks on end.
I posted about querying my ms before it was ready (suffered from skidmarks of sh!ittiness as well), but your post made me think of a girl in a writing class I signed up for.
When we went around the room introducing ourselves and saying why were there, she said," I wrote a book and passed it around to my family members. For my birthday, they all went in on a writing class for me." And she sounded so grateful--but I'm sure at some point, she went "Ohhhhh, now I get it."
Oh man, Jennifer's comment about "you've improved so much"-- that is my least favorite beta response ever. LOL
Haha...my CP told me I have improved so much the other day. :-\
I sometimes still have a hard time embracing a terrible first draft. Gah! Why can't the words just be as beautiful as I imagine they should?
But I'm getting better about it.
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