Five Things I Learned While Writing My First Draft

I recently finished the second draft of my debut novel, and while I know I have a long way to go between now and releasing the novel, I've been thinking a lot lately about the process of writing my first, and now second, draft. There were plenty of lessons that I've already learned and I've decided to share the five biggest ones I've learned with you.

1)You don't HAVE to write every day

There's a lot of writing advice out there that says to be a "real writer" or to prove you "want it badly enough" that you have to write every day, and you have to get x number of words added to the manuscript per day or you're not trying hard enough. I think that's crap. It adds unnecessary pressure and imposes limits that don't need to be there.

I tried to write every day, but found it didn't work for me. My creativity and motivation ebbed and flowed, and some days, it just wasn't there. There were some days that I wrote 0 words, and other days when I wrote as many as 3,500 words. It took me a little longer than I anticipated to finish the draft, but there's no deadline for finishing.

2) You have to give yourself permission for it to be imperfect

I don't know who first called it a "rough draft" but it's aptly named. A first draft won't be perfect and you shouldn't strive for perfection. I told myself this before I started writing, but that wasn't enough to ingrain the idea in my mind.

I didn't do a ton of outlining, so my first draft was when I figured out certain story beats and finalized some others. In a lot of ways, my first draft was the first time I told myself the full story.

The point is to get the framework of the story down on paper. Issues can be fixed in later drafts, details and characterization can be expanded up later, but there's nothing to mold and shape if you don't get the basics written down.

To quote Dr. Seuss, "everything stinks til it's finished" and you need to give yourself permission to let the draft be bad, so you can make it better later.

3) Your word count might end up higher (or lower) than you think

Word counts are funny, in that sometimes you'll feel like you wrote 300 words, but instead you wrote double that and others, you'll think you've written 1,000 and you've only written around 700. When you put this all together, you might find that your story is longer than you anticipated, or that you can tell it more concisely than you expected to.

My first draft wound up being roughly 70k words, and I expected it to be shorter, at around 50k words. If I'd stopped at the 50k "goal" I had, I would've had to make a lot of changes to tell a complete story in that length. 70k was the length it needed to be for me to get everything down I needed in the first draft, so that's the word count I wound up with.

4) You can save things for later drafts

When I started writing, I found myself researching a lot as I was writing and trying to add a great level of detail while I was doing so. So, I found myself falling down rabbit holes and wasting a lot of time searching for the perfect words for x or researching topic y.

I quickly realized that this tactic didn't work for me, as I'd get too lost in research and wouldn't make any progress. I wasn't expecting my book to be research-heavy, but wound up exploring a number of topics I hadn't expected to. Because of this, I switched the way I wrote early on.

Getting the story down is important for Draft 1, adding things like character descriptions or depictions of body language, or a deep-dive into history or science can wait for Draft 2 or in-between drafts.

5) You'll find inspiration in unexpected places

The thing about inspiration is that it can come from so many different sources and in ways you don't anticipate. While I was writing my draft, I thought a lot about storytelling and how narratives are constructed. I wound up paying attention to things I normally wouldn't in other media. I write urban fantasy, but found myself inspired and developing new ideas after reading a contemporary romance book or watching a horror movie.

Inspiration really is everywhere and it's something I find wonderful and fascinating about the writing process.

Those are the five biggest lessons I learned while writing my first draft. Maybe some of these are obvious to others, or are specific to me, but I found them interesting. It was both easier than I feared, but more difficult in other areas.

I look forward to sharing more of my writing journey with you.

Please let me know what you think!