I started writing the first draft of my novel on December 5, 2016 and finished it on August 14, 2019. The latter day was a bit anti-climactic, and honestly, the main emotion I felt was sadness. Here was this creative thing I’d been slowly chipping away at—which as I mentioned last month felt like a private refuge impervious to opinions from anyone else—that had suddenly become whole. Luckily, it turns out that finishing the first draft of a novel is more like a beginning than an end, so almost four years later I’m still hanging out with my fabricated best friends and growing as I progress. We’ll get to later steps in later posts though. For now, let us return to my climb up only the first mountain.
To kick things off I thought it would be kind of fun to share the first and last words of the draft, but they’re comically uninteresting: “The” and “Sarnoff.” Fill in the blank!
Jokes aside, the idea of filling in the blanks is actually a good concept to play off of here, because that’s definitely a lot of what I did. Heading into the first draft, I knew what the story’s inciting incident was, who the main characters were, what the climax would be, and a rough sense of how things might end. That’s it. Super important guideposts, but there was so much to be discovered (or filled in) between them. At first this process was extremely painful. It took me about six months to write the first two chapters, and another six to write the next three. Granted, I had a full-time job, but I vividly recall this pace as primarily due to low confidence. What the hell was I doing, writing what I envisioned to be a whole novel? What was I even writing about? Was any of it good?
More concretely, here are some specific challenges I struggled through:
Trying really hard to be funny
Feeling like I should end every section and chapter with some sort of dramatic flair
Writing characters outside of my lived experience
Generally finding my voice
Not to be all self-help-book and all, but through is the operative word above. I just kept plugging away even though I didn’t know what I was doing. Slowly, I made my further and further into the story, and started to unearth ideas I had no idea could be there for me to find. A brand new scene here. A fun way to play with form there. Characters that escaped my intent and urged me in the direction they wanted to go. It became, as I’ve written a bit about before, at times something of a transcendental experience. Not religious, not even spiritual—I just straight up saw things come alive on the page that I didn’t know I had in me. And while it was very hard for me not to self-edit as I went, I eventually picked up enough momentum to stop caring whether things were good or bad (trust me, there was plenty of the latter)—I just needed to get the damn thing down. Or out of me, I guess.
Once I wrote the key climactic scene in the story, I knew for sure I could finish the book. I was running downhill. I started to track my word count by month as well as the number of days in that month I had spent writing. Both of those metrics fluctuated month-to-month, to be sure, but I had the goal in sight, a system to keep myself accountable, and enough trust in the process to power through my own insecurity. It was going to happen, and almost three years after I began—or across those almost-three years, I should say—it did.
By the end of the draft, I had 30 chapters that clocked in at over 77,000 words. In general I just wanted to land at whatever length the story itself needed, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a word count that I was trying to get to. It was 75,000. It’s funny, most of the chapters stuck to a pretty consistent length—something like 2,500 words, which suggests that I’m a methodical weirdo, that I’m afraid of drawing too much outside the lines, or that I had a pretty good sense of the pacing I wanted. Maybe some version of all three.
Anyway, that’s the experience I had writing the first draft of a novel. It was infuriating and demoralizing at times and deeply rewarding at others. For most of the process I much preferred having written to actually writing. That’s how it went!
I have more ideas about what else could be interesting to explore as it relates to the writing and publishing journey for this book—including editing, getting feedback from loved ones and unloved strangers, a super unsuccessful stint querying to literary agents, and so on—but I’m also open to thoughts about what you’d like to read! If you have any suggestions, comment below or let me know directly.
maybe it exists but i wish we had a neat term to encapsulate the experience of going through the early steep part of the learning curve for deeply personal & creative work. feels like it would make it much easier to frame the associated battles you fight with yourself as parts of a natural rite of passage vs. indications that you're doing something terribly wrong.