A long time ago, in a writer’s group far away, we would give each other Official Permission To Write Garbage™. (I even went so far as to make a printable little poster.1)
It was all about giving oneself the grace to understand that a first draft will always be shitty. It will be messy, redundant, awkward, redundant, full of typos and holes. And that is okay. Because you can’t edit what you don’t write! So just write it down! Assume no one is going to read the first draft2, and just, you know, give ‘er.
Then let the draft ferment, come back to it with fresh eyes, tidy it up, and voila! A draft you can send to your beta readers/other humans. A process I have been using for over thirty years at this point.
But now I need Official Permission™ for something else.
Editing Fletcher & Cooper Book Two, Episodes 6 & 7 went very, very well for August and September. I routinely went over my daily page count, I was trimming, I was deleting, and it felt great. My original goal (edit the Draft 0 into a Draft 1 by the end of October so that I could set it aside/send it to beta readers while I shifted my focus to NaNo) seemed doable! I was chugging along. Episode 8… lagged a bit. It was getting more rewritey, mostly because that was the point in the original writing process where I wasn’t sure where I was going. Stuff dragged, scenes… imploded. But it okay! I have levelled up my editing skillz! I was up to the task! I got the train back on the tracks and we arrived at the station in time to hit my September mini-goal!
Then I hit Episode 9, aka the endgame, aka The Showdown With The Big Bad.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there was a lot I enjoyed when I did my read-through in preparation. I whipped through it in an afternoon, carried along by the story, and felt very satisified.
But then I went away to think about it.
- I think I maybe read it too fast, because when I started editing Episode 9 like a month later, there were parts I didn’t remember. At all. Important parts.
- The story carried itself, but almost too well. Things wrapped up very conveniently in places, and the stakes and scope of the Showdown could have been much, much bigger. I can’t speak to what I was thinking about in 2019 (the distant, unknowable past) but I get the distinct impression that Past Me was desperate to just… finish the damn thing. Which, fair: it is a sprawling story, with a lot of moving parts, and is like 200,000 words long, IIRC. (That’s why I split it into two books.) So there are a lot of easy outs taken during the Showdown.3
- There were a couple of pivotal/emotional moments that were from one character’s point of view that really really really should have been from another’s to get the full impact of what was happening.
I mean, that’s a small list, right? Just move some reveals around to chats around the fire instead of The Big Showdown, enlarge the scope of said Showdown, rewrite a scene or two from a different POV, and… wait. If I change the Convenient Plan™ into something more thought out and impactful, etc., then great, but now I have to update/throw out/re-write all the parts that resulted of the Convenient Plan™, so now I have to figure out how to re-introduce this character…. And if I want to make the battle bigger and give it higher stakes, I need to rewrite this chunk entirely… wait, but that invalidates this other part over here…
Oh.
Oh no.
I’ve been getting really anxious at the thought of working on F&C. Like, tummy-ache anxious.4 I’ve been putting my ass in the chair, but work is increasingly like pulling teeth and the breezy progress of last month a distant memory. Partly it’s because I know that I am not going to make the deadline–that was obvious when I had hardly progressed for the first two weeks–but I have already given myself grace for that, and extended “the deadline” (that is 100% self-inflicted and arbitrary) to the end of the year.
I can do NaNo, then come back to Episode 9 in December5 and (hopefully) get it into a state for beta reader(s) by the end of the year. It should be okay.
So what’s the anxiety from, then?
It took a lot of journalling, walks, etc., but I realized, FINALLY, realized that I really really really want to do a good job on this book. Far more than my other novels. I want people to love F&C as much as I do6. I want them to be as enthralled with the universe7. I want the sparkly images in my head to translate even more than usual to the page.
And as such, I’ve been agonizing over the changes.
Changes
TO
THE
FIRST
DRAFT.
Remember8, there’s no publisher or similar here. I’m working with a draft 0: there are half-finished scenes in there, notes to myself9, scenes where I started one way, realized half way through the sprint that no, we need to change POV, etc. It’s a MESS. IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE.
SO IS DRAFT ONE.
It’s been so long my process to edit a bit as I go, ferment, and then do another pass before considering it done, that I forget that, actually, most people do many many drafts and that each draft is allowed to be imperfect. That’s why they are drafts. For christ’s sake, I was re-writing & enlarging the ending to Curve on the advice of the publisher, who already loved it.
IT. DOESN’T. HAVE. TO. BE. PERFECT.10
I’m still not entirely sure what wording I will use.
“Official Permission to Write Garbage” is so succinct and catchy. “Official Permission to draft garbage” doesn’t work in the same way, I don’t know why. But I am going to have a think about it, maybe bring it to my writer’s group and workshop it, and then make a new printable.11
And in the meantime I have managed to procrastinate my entire “Dedicate this time to editing” time-bloc away by writing this here blag.
MISSION SUCCESS.
(J/k, I will do some work on F&C after lunch, even with the tummy-ache.)
- Goodness, that was a long time ago. And during the writing of Fletcher & Cooper, to boot! Plus ça change, etc. Also that style was a long-ass time ago too, eep. ↩︎
- This is why I call mine Draft 0. No one gets to read a Draft 0. Sometimes I can barely read a Draft 0. I do not expect other humans to have to suffer as I do. ↩︎
- You know when you’re watching an episode of, I don’t know, Star Trek or something, and the crew is like “OMG we have to do X otherwise the ship will explode, or whatever!” where X is kinda out of left-field and/or hand-wavy and/or wraps everything up in a neat little package with no reprecussions? And you pause the show and turn to your long-suffering partner and explain what the writers could have done instead that a) would have arguably made more sense and b) been more satisfying? THAT. But against something I wrote MYSELF. Which is RUDE. ↩︎
- My tummy hurts right now just thinking about it :c ↩︎
- I know what you’re thinking, but I am not doing Xmas this year after the debacle of last year. (We might go see Doomsday as a matinee. That’s it.) I will prioritize editing. Bah humbug. ↩︎
- Impossible. I am aware. ↩︎
- Ditto. ↩︎
- I know it’s been a while; thank you for sticking with me. ↩︎
- One scene memorably ended rather abruptly with “[I don’t know how to end this]” after the last line of dialogue. Well, thanks for nothing, Past Me, because guess what, Present Me doesn’t have any fucking idea either. ↩︎
- I am yelling at myself, unless you need this reminder as well, in which case, yes, I can yell it at you too. <3 ↩︎
- Smaller and simpler, I promise. ↩︎
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