The First Draft: A Cause For Celebration — But Don’t Go Mad
How to avoid the pain of celebrating a false summit.
I have just finished a book — writing it, not reading it. Woo-hoo! I’m going to celebrate. We’re going to celebrate with a drinks and games night. I have a spouse who suffers the traumas of my books as much as I do, so it’ll be a joint venture, but will we have bubbly or coffee as we set off into the Gorgon’s Loch?
Before revealing the decision, I want to share my end-of-book ritual. It’s always a good feeling to reach “The End”, but it can be soul-destroying to think you’ve finished, and then realise it was a false summit when the celebrations are over.
I don’t allow myself to write “The End” until I’ve done three things:
- Checked the first scene to confirm that it still works.
- Checked the final scene to make sure it works, too.
- Done a global search for the “XXX”s with which I pepper my draft manuscripts to label gaps.
OK, all present and correct, then that’s the first draft done. All the words are in there. They just need polishing, scrubbing, trimming, reordering, throwing out if they’re not pulling their weight, and kicking into line when they stray too far from the track.
It doesn’t do to underestimate that post-first-draft stretch. It can take a long time, sometimes as long as it took to reach first draft status, or even longer. But for me, that doesn’t matter. The words are there. My team is all out on the pitch ready to show off its skill. There are words on the page, painting pictures, cranking up drama, soothing things down — doing all the things that words do. My job is to be the bossy and ruthless manager, to go out amongst them and knock them into shape.
This is the bit I love. No more dragging reluctant paragraphs out from the dressing room and watching their lacklustre attempts to be prose. No more watching words clustered at the far end of the pitch when they need to be right here, right now, and there seems no route to get them moving. No more consternation at a plotline irretrievably cornered with no way out.
As an aside, in one of my earlier whodunnits, I gave the bad guy such a solid alibi that when it came to it, I couldn’t break it. It’s good to land the reader with the unexpected revelation that someone must be innocent, but when it hits the writer at 80 thousand words in, it’s a catastrophe.
But I’ve learnt from these glitches. I now know that the time to celebrate the first draft is when it sets off at a good pace and in the right direction (first scene works), it lands smoothly on the runway at the right airport (final scene works), and there are no awkward gaps left to bridge (none of those pesky XXXs lurking). The journey’s a long way from over, but it’s plain sailing from here.
Worth celebrating for sure. Bubbly or coffee? I have a confession. It isn’t my book that I’ve finished, it belongs to my alter-ego:
It’s going to have to be coffee, and I’ll tell myself that bubbly is for book launches. Keeping it on ice will be a good incentive to get those words into shape as quickly as possible. And anyway, I want my wits about me on this next venture into the Gorgon’s Loch.
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