A Writing Tip that’s Hard to Swallow

I can spend a lot of time thinking about writing but not feeling confident enough to write. I made major headway on this self-imposed obstacle when someone told me, “You can’t get to the final draft until you’ve written the first draft.” It’s so simple. It’s so obvious. And yet.

Sometime you need to hear the obvious to let yourself believe it. Sometimes it takes someone else’s belief in you to take action. I needed to be allowed to write sentences that weren’t perfect. To write paragraphs that were too long. To write a plot that didn’t make sense. Because the qualifier in all this was it wasn’t worth reading…yet. But it could be. It could be the book that someone picks up off the shelf that totally changes their life.

I get to practice this with every new novel. When I was working on my second book, Camellias and Oats, all I had was the first line,

“There may have been birds chirping, but all I heard was the screaming.”

I didn’t want to get weighed down by plot. So I used the line as inspiration. Who would say something like that? Where would she be? What does her life look like? From there, I decided my main character, the voice, and the opening scene. Then, each time I sat down to write, I would just let it flow. I had no idea where I was going. As you can imagine, there was a lot of bad writing. Sometimes I took my fingers off the keyboard and had to take a deep breath. Instinctively, I would correct the words and phrases that came up in red and blue squiggly lines. Before I knew it, I was rereading the paragraph before and editing. When I realized what I was doing, I would slink back to page 7 or 32 or 57 and guiltily continue writing. But I kept at it and I actually started churning out pages. And given enough time, I even started to enjoy it. I watched the word count climb higher. It was 15,000 words, then 30,000. By the time I reached 50,000, I was too busy writing to notice.

So swallow that tough pill and go write. Go write badly. Write the first thing that comes into your head and refuse the urge to edit it. Leave that awful sentence with too many adjectives staring at you from the page and keep going. Keep going until you think you have no more words to say and then keep going.