“The first draft of anything is shit.”
--- Ernest Hemingway
A lecturer at St. Andrews has this quote hanging on her
office door, as if challenging all the complacent undergraduates waiting in the
hallway. I always found it vaguely encouraging, as much as anything by
Hemingway could be encouraging. Maybe the chapter draft I just sent to my
supervisor wasn’t all that great, but that’s fine. It’s a draft. It’ll get
better.
I’ve never minded the idea of writing a bad first draft. I
love things like NaNo, where you just write without worrying if it’s any good.
I’m not a perfectionist, and the process of actually getting words down on
paper has always been relatively easy for me.
But I’ve never been good at actually doing anything with
those words. I’ve written five novels, and none of them have ever made it past
a first draft. I’ve never actually polished anything until it was as good as I
could make it.
With four of these novels, I know I made the right choice to
move on. The first one was essentially a Tolkien fan-fic. The second was a
mystery with plot holes as wide as the Northumberland Strait. The third was an
international thriller with even larger plot holes and a rather dubious
treatment of terrorism. The fourth was a YA dystopian, written just before Divergent was published and
unfortunately left unfinished before the dystopian bubble burst. I learned so
much from writing each of these novels, but none of them were worth polishing.
And then, after a six-year hiatus, NaNo 2016 produced my
fifth novel, a futuristic retelling of Shakespeare’s Richard II. I wrote
119,053 words in 68 days, and then returned to real life (or, y’know, writing a
PhD.)
The difficulty with this novel is that, nearly a year later,
I still think it’s good. I still love the characters. I love the story. I even
love the writing (some of the time…). For the first time, there are no major
flaws.
But that’s the problem. For the first time, I have no choice
but to actual return to my novel and edit it. I can’t just stick it in a drawer
and write a new novel. I’ve got to actually edit this one.
That’s certainly not going to be easy. As much as I love it,
I know the story has significant issues. The world needs to be more developed.
The themes need to be more subtle. The emotional arc needs to be polished. Relationships
between characters need to be clarified. Certain scenes should be added, others
cut.
I’ve written five novels. I know how to hammer out a story
in a few weeks. But I have no clue how to polish it. On a practical level, I
literally don’t know how to begin.
But also, on an emotional level, I’m scared to start
editing. Because once I start to polish my novel, then I’ll really know if it’s
any good. Then I’ll know if I’m actually any good.
If Hemingway was right, if the first draft of anything is
shit, then that means that the real work of writing isn’t in getting words down
on paper. It’s not writing 119,053 words in 68 days. If Hemingway was right,
then the real work of writing comes in taking those rubbish words and making them
shine. And that’s something I’ve never done.
There’s a strange sort of comfort in not trying. The world
is full of people who think they could write a novel, and they’ll keep saying that
until they try and fail. I think I can edit a book, and get an agent, and a
publisher… and I’ll be able to keep thinking that until I try and fail.
I don’t really think I’ll fail, not ultimately. I believe
that with enough hard work, I’ll eventually produce something good enough to be
published. But I can’t say that I’m not scared of all the rejection that’s
undoubtedly going to come. The books I’ll try to edit only to find they’re
really not good enough. The agents who’ll send form rejection emails. The
publishers who pass. The readers who write bad reviews.
Right now I can call myself a writer and not have to face
any of that failure. Except, to keep calling myself a writer, I need to keep
moving forward. I need to move beyond what I’m comfortable with and start doing
what scares me.
I need to start turning my gargantuan first draft into
something worth reading.
Let’s see how this goes.
