Thread: ...But just HOW bad are your first drafts?

Originally Posted by Non Serviam

Kill my babies, you ask? I mean those little phrases, images and metaphors you think are really clever or well-done when you write them, and don't realise how cringeworthy they are until 1 second after letting someone else read the manuscript.

Yes, Stephen King made mention of this. "Kill your Darling", I think he said. But in any case, yah, I like when that happens, when we think something prophetic or grandly insightful and then get slapped in the face with a wet herring of reality and realize how dorky it really sounds.

If I wanted people to know just how bad my first drafts are, then they wouldn't be first drafts. My crappy drafts are between me and the spousal unit.

Originally Posted by Mistique

So somehow if I am not so scared of failing I manage to do fine.

That's an important key. There's nothing to be afraid of when writing. The words aren't going to bite back if they don't come out perfect the first time. Like anything that involves creativity, being perfect is out of the question. All you can do is your best, and you can't even go that far if you're paralyzed by the fear of not being perfect.

Originally Posted by C.M.C.

That's an important key. There's nothing to be afraid of when writing. The words aren't going to bite back if they don't come out perfect the first time. Like anything that involves creativity, being perfect is out of the question. All you can do is your best, and you can't even go that far if you're paralyzed by the fear of not being perfect.

Now that would be going against my very nature I am a perfectionist

But you are right it is quite paralyzing

Originally Posted by Non Serviam

Mine have improved. They used to be bloody atrocious, and now they're usually just mediocre.

I used to have a bad habit of editing too soon after writing it, with the result that I was tinkering with the cosmetic stuff (grammar, specific word choice) without fixing the more fundamental problems (plot holes, strange character behaviour, deus ex machina) because I was too close to the writing to see them. It took me a long time to break that.

I'm also slowly learning to kill my babies, which is also hard going.

Kill my babies, you ask? I mean those little phrases, images and metaphors you think are really clever or well-done when you write them, and don't realise how cringeworthy they are until 1 second after letting someone else read the manuscript.

Thank you. I was just very happy with one such, just a night ago.

Oh, I've had a lot of those. Painful to look back on.

My first drafts are generally about 90% perfect, because I edit as I go. I can't work any other way.

Originally Posted by Mike C

My first drafts are generally about 90% perfect, because I edit as I go. I can't work any other way.

Do you do a lot of pre-planning as well?

Originally Posted by Ilasir Maroa

Do you do a lot of pre-planning as well?

Bang! There's the billion-dollar question.
Yes for me...by the time I'm doing a draft, I already have character sketches, some vignettes, and my major plot points.

Originally Posted by Ilasir Maroa

Do you do a lot of pre-planning as well?

I very seldom plot. Some people swear by it. I guess it's personal preference, but I like my writing to be unpredictable, so that it will surprise me, and so that sometimes I can create an amazing spur-of-the-moment cliffhanger or red herring which blows my mind.

I find it more fun that way. Having an outline, for me, is like writing an essay for college where you have to adhere to structure and rules. You know from the start exactly where it's going, and writing it -- for me, I'm not generalising -- is mundane.

Originally Posted by moderan

Bang! There's the billion-dollar question.
Yes for me...by the time I'm doing a draft, I already have character sketches, some vignettes, and my major plot points.

Yes. My point being, you can sort of "revise" as you go, in the sense that by the time you have a complete draft, you're done and with the plot holes fixed. But that's not quite the same as having a perfect first draft. Just because you don't revise after you get a complete draft, that doesn't mean you've revised any less than someone who writes the first draft all the way through and then revises after.

Maybe I misunderstood the question. My first draft is nowhere near finished, and by the time it is, it will have been thoroughly tenderized.

I first just meant the initial go, each writing burst, before I start picking at it. So, in that case, I imagine it will be cleaner by far when the initial 'book' is all laid out. Still, to me, I would have considered myself to kind of be going from my first draft, straight to about my eighth.

Originally Posted by Ilasir Maroa

Do you do a lot of pre-planning as well?

None, I like to wing it. If I try to plan a story I get bored. I generally start out with an interesting first sentence, or a phrase or title, and see where that takes me.

Originally Posted by Ungood

Yes, Stephen King made mention of this. "Kill your Darling", I think he said.

It's not a King quote, but has been attributed to Mark Twain and William Faulkner, but originally the phrase was ‘murder your darlings’, and it came from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”.

I've done this weird technique; where I write down a lot of crappy sentences and the general idea of the chapter first, sometimes leaving out big chunks but writing 'he asks her about the history, she tells him' and that sort of thing.
Later I go back and actually 'fill it in', writing descriptions, tidying up and writing dialogue and all the other bits that actually make the story good (well... that's relative).

It seemed to work, the people I actually allowed to read it seemed to love it. These weren't friends or family either, so I know they weren't just trying to please me.

A friend 'stole' a copy of a short story I wrote and read it; he said it was pretty good and that one was a total winged attempt, with a big edit later. I seem to change tactic a lot.

I also gather up tons of ideas, I have loads of Word documents which detail the background story to many varied worlds, people, technologies and magic; hardly any of them come to fruition.