I was listening to a recent episode of the excellent podcast Ctrl Alt Delete, featuring guest author Matt Bell talking about his novel writing guide book Refuse to be Done. It’s a very good listen:
Matt and Emma’s points chime with most of the writers I interviewed while producing the Writing Life podcast. Accepted wisdom goes something like this:
First drafts are usually quite bad
This is completely fine, and a necessary part of the process
Redrafting is essential
Books require extensive editing before becoming readable
Writing in public
On the one hand, I completely agree with all of that. Every writer has a different way of writing, so there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of doing it, but the vast majority of writers I know keep their first drafts under lock and key. The first draft is a notepad, a blueprint, a test bed to try out ideas and hunt for the novel’s purpose. It’s in writing the first draft that you figure out what the book is about, and tune in to the characters and themes. Matt talks really eloquently about all this on the pod.
The other part of my brain was thinking “yes, but that’s not how I do it.”
For the last seven-ish years I’ve written and published my first drafts chapter-by-chapter, week-by-week. This started off as an experiment in serial fiction but turned into a productivity hack that has kept me consistent and focused. As a result I’ve got three books out into the wild, with a fourth serialising on this newsletter every Friday. I wrote a guide to writing in this way here:
Anecdotally, people do seem enjoy what I write. Comments have generally been very positive, and that’s from random people I don’t know (not my mum). But listening to Ctrl Alt Delete, I couldn’t help but wonder: Am I doing it wrong? Am I mad for putting my first draft up in public?
What is a first draft?
Well. It depends. Everyone’s concept of a ‘first draft’ is different, because it is formed directly from a writer’s method. Some writers put their first draft together in a very non-linear way, jumping around the story and slowly building it from disconnected pieces. I’ve talked to writers who write in a very rough form, almost a shorthand, which wouldn’t work if seen by others.
There are writers who have no idea what a book is going to be about until after they’ve written that first draft. They figure out most of what the book ‘is’ while writing it. This is something that did happen to me with my first serial story, A Day of Faces, which mutated as it went along, its themes only becoming properly clear to me in the second half. One day I’ll revise it properly.
The question here is not “do books get better in subsequent drafts?”, because there’s no debate there. Whether it’s a second draft or a fifth draft, iterating on a manuscript is a process of improvement. The critical thing for me is whether a first draft can ever be good enough.
I have a few things in my favour:
I write in a linear fashion, from start to finish. This makes it possible for me to publish in an on-going serial form.
I work out my themes and plot in advance. I still fine tune and even alter it was I go along, but I never go into a book ‘blind’.
I’ve been a professional copywriter in various capacities for a couple of decades, which helps with being able to write quickly and accurately. Typos still creep in, inevitably, but the text is at least legible.
Writing on a computer is also vital. It’s the only way I can write at a pace which keeps up with the words forming in my head. It also enables me to do minor re-drafting during the initial writing. It’s very rare that a paragraph makes it into my first drafts without being at least partially re-written on the fly. That flexibility is only afforded me by writing on a computer - by hand I’d feel far more constricted.
The case of The Mechanical Crown
There’s one interesting example in my back catalogue. The Mechanical Crown is, in fact, a second draft total re-write. The original version was written in the 2000s and it wasn’t very good. I worked out the skeleton of the plot and some of the characters, but the prose itself was awful and it was all a bit flimsy. When I serialised it on Wattpad between 2016 and 2019 it was with a completely new version, re-written from the ground up. I removed and combined characters, introduced brand new themes, deepened motivations, tidied up plotlines and adjusted the pacing. I still wrote that book on-the-fly, chapter-by-chapter, week-by-week, but it was a brand new, second iteration of that story. There’s no way it could have been what it is without me writing that first draft back in my 20s.
I fully accept that redrafting is important and makes books better. The challenge I have is that I can’t write in private. Keeping my projects behind closed doors means that I never finish them: they end up languishing in drawers and on hard drives; I get distracted by something new and shiny, and it doesn’t matter because nobody ever knows. Publishing my first drafts, as I’m doing with Triverse on this newsletter, keeps me focused and productive.
Having listened to Matt Bell on that podcast, though, I understand better now why other writers think I’m a little bit mad.
How many drafts do you go through before showing your work to others?
Doing exactly what you've done is what I am intending to do with my novel. "Writing in public" is a scary thought, but also exhilarating. A couple of years ago, I committed to writing a post every week (on Facebook) which was basically a short true-ish short story about every year of my life (I was turning 52, so 52 weeks-52 years-52 stories). It turned out to be a huge success for me, just from a turning off the procrastination button. Knowing I'd committed to posting it every week made me not be so obsessed with making it perfect. Plus knowing people were (theoretically) waiting for it kept me totally on track for the whole year (this in spite of the onset of the Pandemic, and two hurricanes directly hitting my town, Lake Charles, Louisiana). Best of all, I realized that I didn't care if there were typos (fixable) or other things I wanted to change, because I could. What I'd put out there wasn't the permanent version.
So Substack's features and structure seem perfect for what I want to do. A chapter a week, no matter how rough. Plus some background lore, behind-the-scenes, "casting" discussions, or any other process posts in a side stack that I might make the experiment at paid content.
All this said, what are the more practical downsides to doing it this way? Have you gotten any nibbles of anyone (publishers or otherwise) interested in doing anything more with your work? Or more specifically, anyone saying that putting it up there is a bad idea for XYZ reasons? What about the always-lingering fear of someone stealing your work and just publishing a pdf they cut and pasted on Amazon? I don't have that fear, but surely someone has done some actual research into the reality of that happening.
One thing I'm really interested in experimenting with is developing a community of fans, even if it's just a handful, who are interested in semi-actively participating in the journey. Helping decide between two options of a character name, feedback on a potential long-term plot point, insight into an aspect of my story (like a profession or hobby) that I may lack, etc. Have you had any experience with this type of engagement, or have you heard about anyone doing it?
I've written stuff forever in isolation. I'm really looking forward to the experiment of doing it where it has the chance to both gain fans, but also gain people who hate it, lol. All feedback is great and valuable.
Boldly publishing first drafts of serialized fiction as a “productivity hack” is a genius idea. I enjoy seeing your words at work
I on the other hand am an intensely private writer, drafting multiple versions of even my short micros! Weekly publishing with the launch of my newsletter this year has, thankfully, helped move me to a happy medium between the two.
As always, I appreciate how you share your writing process.