BE BOLD : WRITE THAT FIRST DRAFT WITH GUSTO

 Be Bold

I’m a discovery writer. I’m working on a new draft now, and I’m struggling some days. When you first start a new draft, it’s all possibility. It’s great because you can go anywhere. But after thirty pages it’s not so great. Why? Because you can go anywhere.

All the possibilities, all the choices—that’s what a first draft is full of. It seems like every few pages you come to some new crossroads. Decision time. If you think about it too much, you’ll freeze at those places. Going down one road always means you won’t be going down another. What interesting things might you have come to if you had gone down the other? Sounds a little like life, doesn’t it? I mean even if you Boldy go where no one or not many have gone before, even if you choose that less-travelled road, you still can’t help thinking, what if I had gone the other way?

But writing a novel is all about choices and many of those choices, in a first draft, are intuitive. If you’re a discovery writer like me  I’d argue you have to be bold. It’s the only way you can get through a first draft. JUST KEEP WRITING. Use your process. Don’t worry too much.

 

However, there is a way writing differs from life. You can revise. You don’t get that in real life. If there’s a big problem in your writing, you can rework it For example, let’s say your plot takes a wrong turn. Let’s say you find out on page 199 that, in fact, the butler really did do it. You can reverse engineer your work so that it looks like the butler did it all along. You go back and change what you need to change so it will lead to the butler doing it.

So that makes the fact that you need to be bold with your choices even more important. You need to push on in a first draft. You need to find connections in your story. You need to find moments that illuminate character or plot or setting. 

 

Go at a first draft like you’re jumping off a cliff and believe in the seemingly impossible—you will sew your parachute on the way down.

P.S. If you're interested in reading my work or are already reading my series STRANGELY SCARY FUNNY book 10 in that series, a humorous supernatural suspense comedy horror, comes out on Saturday Dec 14. Almost Armageddon in book 10—a week away. Many strange and scary and funny things are happening.

Thanks for reading. Write on. 

Brian