#3 - On First Drafts
I am writing this book one essay at a time. I don't have a plan, just a list I made last year of "everything I know about writing." Every morning, after breakfast, I take one item from the list and start writing, without pausing or going back to edit, and I keep going until I've said everything I know about the topic.
These first drafts includes a lot of fluff, extra details and tangents and discussions that deserve their own essay. But I don't stop myself from putting them into the essay because when I'm writing the first draft, my only task is to put it down all into words, including words that don't belong there. As the author Jodi Picoult says, "I may write garbage, but you can always edit garbage. You can't edit a blank page."
When I start writing, my goal is to have the first draft by the time I stop--and to not stop before I have a complete essay, no matter how poorly written. They keyword is complete, not perfect.
Once I have my first draft, I go do other things--cook, have lunch, write other things, read. Then I come back to the draft, and edit it. Rewrite the introduction, remove a tangent, add examples, phrase things more clearly. By evening, or before going to bed, I hit "Publish."
And hitting publish is relieving. Because it means I've made progress, because it means I've added to what is actually the first draft of Kadambari.
Usually, when authors serialise their work, publishing one part at a time, they already have several chapters, if not the entire book, written and edited. Sometimes, they write half a dozen chapters beforehand, then release them at a rate of one per week while they write the remaining chapters.
I'd wanted to do this project for quite some time but didn't think I was ready, and when I finally had the chance, I jumped into it without waiting--I knew from past experience that if I didn't take advantage of this motivation, my energy would die down and be replaced by self-doubt.
So here I am, writing a book on the fly. I have no drafts prepared beforehand and I have 200 essays to write in a year that has a little less than 300 days left in it. I'll be starting my postgraduate studies in June. I'll have exams and deadlines. I'll fall sick; the period cramps will be unbearable; we'll visit family. There will be interruptions, both expected and otherwise, so I am taking advantage of the current lack of interruptions to stay on track and finish this book before 2025.
Because this book is a first draft, and I have a limited number of days in which I can complete it, I cannot take my time to fret over every single word. And that's good for me. Because when you have all the time in the world, when you work without a deadline, or without any defined limitations on your project, you can take forever to finish things. You might never write anything at all.
When you start learning how to ride a bicycle, you don't fall off on your first try, then go read manuals on riding a bicycle or watch other people do it. You try riding it again, fall off over and over, until it becomes easy, until you don't even have to think about maintaining your balance or guiding your bicycle around turns and potholes.
Writing is similar. You learn by doing. And doing means finishing things.
But why does finishing matter, when the point is to write more? 10,000 words of finished stories are the same as 10,000 words of unfinished stories. In a way, that's true, and if that's how you choose to practice, you can.
But here's the thing: when you finish things, you become more confident, because you understand the most important step of writing: have a first draft. A first draft is messy, but it is complete. Once you have this mess, you can tidy it up. The more drafts you have, the more you'll be able to look at your words and move them around and have stories or essays you can submit to a magazine or show your friends.
You can't do anything with an incomplete draft, except complete it. And when you've been away from a story for long, when you've lost enthusiasm for an idea, finishing drafts is an incredibly difficult thing to do (though it's not impossible).
But here's the more important lesson when it comes to finishing what you start writing: you stop fearing the blank page. Often, beginner writers start writing, look at the few sentences in front of them, don't like what they've produced, then erase it and start over. First drafts often induce fear and embarrassment--you don't know what to write about, you hate what you've written, you don't feel ready, and so on.
And once you try to start over, it becomes even more difficult to write, because you feel like you must have the perfect first line, and only then can you write the rest of it.
This is not true. A good first line can be added later. In fact, during editing, writers often delete a lot of what they initially wrote. And that's not a waste of words and time, because they needed those bad words to get them to the good bits, as the Ray Bradbury quote in a previous essay said.
In fact, these words are part of the second draft. I've removed a large part of what I wrote this morning and put it in a different text file because I realised it needs an essay of its own. I'm adding links and quotes and editing what I'd already written, correcting typos, deleting unnecessary sentences, and son. In another half an hour, by the time my mother calls us all to dinner, I will have hit publish.
Perhaps in a few days or weeks, or even tomorrow, if I reread this essay I'll find several flaws in it. Maybe I could have rearranged some paragraphs, maybe I could have repeated myself a little less, maybe I should have kept it short, maybe I should have said more, and so on. But right now, I am creating the first draft of this book, which is taking shape with each new essay. Even I don't know what it'll look like in its final form. Once I have all 200 essays, I can go back and rearrange them into different sections, like in an actual book. I can remove certain essays, or add to the ones that already exist. Maybe, by the time I get to essay #200, I'll realise I haven't shared everything I had to share. Maybe I'll say it all by essay #114. I don't know. And I won't know, until I write it all down.
The same is true on a smaller level. When I sat down to write an essay this morning, I knew I had to talk about first drafts. But other than that, I had no plan. I started writing as if I were talking to my assumed audience, and let the words come. Then in the evening, I added, removed, rearranged, rephrased.
Everyone is unprepared when they start. That's why they are there, at the beginning (of their entire writing career, of their 9th book, of their 100th blog post or short story). No one knows, when they sit down to write, what the final piece would look like, even if they know what they want to say.
And at this point, it's not important to know. It's only important to write. If you've decided to take up the simple (not necessarily easy) challenge of writing 500 words every day for the next 30 days, your only goal is to get to that 500-word mark. Open a new doc or a notebook, and start writing. You don't need a title; you don't need a topic. You just need to start writing, and keep doing so until you reach your goal.
All of this is practice, which means you can ramble, you can use cliches, you can write lists instead of paragraphs, you can ignore grammar and punctuation. No one has to see what you write. You don't have to read what you write either. You just have to learn to stop fearing the blank page and throw garbage into it with abandon.
These drafts don't have to be creative, or original, or important, or even logical. They just have to exist. That's the goal with a first draft, that's the goal every time you sit down to write, regardless of what you're writing and how long you've been doing so: sit at your table and get the words down.
Write, then return tomorrow, and write again, and repeat. Soon, it'll be easy, Soon, you'll like what you write. Soon, you'll have a lot of words that you could or couldn't edit and publish, because you would have understood the fundamental truth of writing: all the first draft has to do is to exist. That's the only thing that matters right now, which is why I am going to stop editing and hit publish. Dinner has been served.