Drafts Are Ugly Things

 Q: How rough or polished are your first drafts? Do you dare show us?

-from Susan

 

Writers who can plow straight through a really rough draft, ignoring the inevitable major and minor problems, word choices, dropped clues, etc. impress me with their steely willpower. Over the years, I have learned not to obsess every day about what I wrote yesterday, or the day before, or since the first page. But I still go back and read yesterday’s work if only to set myself on the same path. And when something screams at me, I can’t help it. I stop and fix it even if the first shoe that dropped was 50 pages ago. 

 

I guess I’m afraid I will forget the mistake if I let it go for now. Yes, notes - right now, I’m looking at a piece of paper that says (among other things) “pg 67 – key for storage area or why not?” Why not indeed. My WIP is due in a couple of weeks and, truth be told, I do not know the answer. At least I know where to find the reference to it! Also this from the same notes page: “SDLCODP – organized crime. Elite.” Because it stopped me in my tracks when I realized it wasn’t going to work as slang for the Paris Prefecture’s organized crime unit, it sits there, and I have had to do a work around.

 

The other side of that piece of blue paper has two columns of numbers. Spanning several generations, trying to give my characters in the multi-generational part of this story had me so confused I finally decide the only way to be sure what I wanted to do was believable was to show each year visually. 

Abir Mukherjee, an accountant in his previous life, would lift a lip in distain if he weren’t such a lovely man, but, hey, rather this than getting lousy reviews on Amazon because she would have been his great-great-grandmother, you idiot!.

 

By the time the initial draft is done, it’s halfway decent except for the mistakes I made, like leaving out an essential piece of a scene, giving the same person two entirely different names, or realizing a clever red herring I planted in the first section has faded into the wallpaper by the climax, never to be mentioned again.

 

Writing is brutal, infuriating business at times. But it’s better than waiting tables at a busy restaurant, something I sucked at in college, so I’m sitting – as Annie Lamott says, “butt in chair” – until this final draft is ready to send.