Beautiful Writing vs the Quick and Dirty Draft
As it is November, and time for NaNowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), I thought I might talk about the inner conflict between getting something on the page, and getting something beautiful on the page. There are a few lucky writers who do not suffer from this inner conflict. Writers who write fast and love every word so much they never look back, and writers who linger over one sentence for weeks or months, until they are ready to move onto the next. Writers who trust their own process, in other words. Rare creatures, much to be envied.
I, however, am like most other writers. I sweat the words out onto the page and then cringe to reread them, wondering if I should start over from scratch, or go work at Wal*Mart. Worse, my process changes on me without notice. One day I’m falling into the writing zone at 5 a.m., the next I can’t get a decent word out until 11 p.m. Or my always linear plot revelation comes to me in choppy, unsequenced bits and pieces.
There are a few things about my writing process that have never wavered: I always have to get to the end before I really know how to tell the story I’m telling; I never have enough sensory detail in the first draft; I never have enough conflict in the first draft. These three constants mean only one thing: When I get to “the end” I’m going to have to revise the whole novel, every page. Usually more than once. The bad news is that I can take five years to write the first draft, and I’m still going to have to revise. The good news is that I enjoy the analytical process of revising (it is the secret Lit professor hiding deep within me).
The even better news is that I relish writing a quick and dirty 50,000 words in November. I’ve done NaNo for several years now. My first YA (written, second published) The Salem Witch Tryouts was a nano novel. The novel I’m revising (fifth revision) was drafted last NaNo. And I’m expecting to draft my newest idea this year, despite the slow start, which will mean 3,000 new words a day (the most I’ve ever written in one day’s worth of writing was 24,000, but I can hit 5,000 easily when I know where I’m going — which, I hasten to add, is very different from knowing the best way to tell a story until the end…for example, I could get to California without a map, but it would take experience…and a really good map…to get there by the best route possible).
Why do I torture myself this way? Because my process dictates that I don’t know the best way to tell my story until I finish the first draft, so why drag it on the drafting forever. My quick and dirty drafts allow my subconscious to bury delicious little nuggets of story in amongst the detail-free tundra of first draft prose. That means all winter, huddled in front of the wood stove drinking tea for warmth and comfort, I can pick through the tundra for buried nuggets, dig them up, order them properly, and nourish them with vivid detail and high stakes conflict.
This year I’ve been wrestling big time with developing the beauty in my stories. I almost didn’t try NaNo this year, worrying that drafting beautifully was more important than revising for beauty. Then I came to my senses and referred back to the touchstone of my own process. Get it on the page first, then revise. Just because an acorn gets dropped by a greedy squirrel and tramped into the ground by a deer hoof does not mean it won’t grow into a gorgeous oak tree with proper soil, sunlight and rain.
Really, is it any wonder that my NaNo moniker is prosewars?
Kelly
