‘How Do I Let a Draft be a Draft?’

Dear Yanyi,

Thank you for The Reading, and thank you to all of the writers asking questions I didn’t know I was carrying myself. This has been a really treasured component of my never-ending writing education, and it’s great to be here with you all.

I’m a poet, mostly, but sometime last winter I decided to start writing a novel. I love fiction and I help edit books in my day job. In many ways, it really just felt like time to take my idea and run with it, to try to sustain my creative practice with a real, full-length draft. To see if I could actually do it!

I’m around halfway through, and it’s been a powerful learning experience already. That said, I struggle to “let go” and just fall into the experience of writing. I worry I’m not following my notes/research, I worry about continuity and all kinds of nitpicky things, I worry about leaving each sentence shiny and lovely and getting stuck when it’s time to move to the next one. Intellectually, I know I’m probably capable of fixing and improving the manuscript further down the road—my editing pays the bills. How to let go and let a draft be a draft and trust my “future self” for a revision one day?

Sincerely,
Present Self

Dear PS,

Thank you for your letter. Perhaps this letter reaches you a year too late—or perhaps it will still be of some help, whatever writing you are doing now.

Sometimes it is difficult to write if you’ve being harsh on yourself, in which case it may help to fail on purpose . It’s also possible that your editing brain is just still on when you’re working on the novel. You know what you would say to one of your authors—so why would you let it slide when you’re working on something for yourself?

Unfortunately, you already know the outcome when an editor hovers over your writing shoulder: even if you’re not being harsh with yourself, there’s a perfectionist who can’t let go of anything you say without needlessly poring over every sentence, and as a result, you can’t let go. You say as much in your letter.

From even your casual mention of notes and research, my guess is that you’ve already done a lot of work before even starting to write this novel. You may have written outlines and character sketches; you may have traveled out of your way, in books and in the world, to get the feel of your vision just right.

My advice that follows assumes that your outline is actually pretty solid. I’m assuming that when you go back to your notes, you’re not wholly cutting major characters or introducing significant new tensions into the plot. I’m assuming that for the most part, you know the story from every major character’s point of view, you know how the whole thing will end, and you’re shifting minor details and rewriting your plans anyway.

Since you started from the vantage point of a poet, let’s dwell a bit on the differences of between poems and novels. For one, you have a short-form piece and a long-form piece. You may write a poem that is one page, in one person’s voice, and it would be done within the day, if not a fortnight. The magnitude of time is not the same for a novel.

Novels are typically hundreds of pages. They often involve not just one character, but several, all of whom are required to dance in tension through connections and disconnections. A plan is required for each of these pieces to be held together, for their arrangement to cohere into a larger whole. What about each these character’s lives, up until your book, makes their combination not a situation, but a story? What about this story makes you want to write it, and how will you?

Just to begin your novel, you will have had to think through these questions. It seems almost counterintuitive, then, after all that work, that you wouldn’t be able to just settle down and write it. It may pain you, actually, that any drop of your previous efforts may have been for naught. But I’ll hazard a guess that your block is coming from something deeper than this sunk-cost attachment to your outline.

Since you do not specify, I find myself imagining how this might play out. Perhaps while you’re writing, you write a sentence that you find terrible. You return to your notes to comfort yourself with the larger, masterful scheme you’ve laid out. Yet, now doubt creeps in. If the plan was so masterful, then why can’t you write it? So you leave your notebook, take the day off, and tackle notes and research again. This goes on for quite some time until you have sufficiently exhausted yourself from replanning. You begin to write again, and the same thing plays out.

There is something comforting about planning a Big Thing. How wonderful that a 300-page tome may be condensed into a constellated paragraph, where every chapter might be summarized and the whole can be seen from above. In some ways, it seems even more straightforward than waiting for a poem to appear and the hasty chase for it once it does. Yet, this may be wishful thinking about the novel. Perhaps a hope that if you can write an outline, especially a detailed one where everything from the period research to each character’s birthmark has been set, then maybe the novel can be automatic, almost like an assembly line.

But when the sentences don’t immediately come out right or your set-up doesn’t yield the tension you need, the solution is not to double-down on scaffolding. Although the novel form and its planning stages may suggest that you can control it, my guess is that the opposite is true. If your anxieties are preventing you from continuing to write, then you’re to practice loosening your grip rather than tightening it.

Plans are all about potential . What will you put down, when it comes down to it? Everyone talks about the shitty first draft, that horrible blob that gives you the true bird’s eye view and not just the scribblings, but there’s something to it. In every shitty first draft, you will learn two things: what you are capable of writing on initial dash and, more importantly, what you actually want to write.

To write a shitty first draft, you must throw out any idea that you have for quality. “Quality” is qualitative. It comes from other people’s ideas of good art, combined into the sensibility that is the editor on your shoulder. And once you get rid of your attachment to quality, you’ll be able to hear the muse in your ear—the voice within only you can make real.

Holding fast to one’s notes is an attachment to quality—the work must be accurate, consistent, continuous, etc. Yet, what would happen if you didn’t stick with your outline? If you weren’t accurate or consistent with those historic details, with your past self’s dictations? You may respond that the whole story would fall apart. You may protest that you would have to start all over, with new characters and new situations. You may fear that you’d never reach the end. But the way you’re going, you wouldn’t reach the end anyway. Your outcome wouldn’t actually change.

Nothing will happen if your write bad sentences. No one will hunt you down and you will not be punished. In fact, dawdling and giving yourself the leisurely pace of running into dead-ends, will only give you a better idea of why this path forward instead of that path. Or, you stand to be pleasantly surprised by the possibilities that the new experiment affords you.

I write these letters on two documents—one that holds the “cuttings” and the other that holds the current draft. Quite often, in the past, I’ve gotten over halfway through but have ended up stuck, unsure about where to go on next. It’s those times, more often than not, that I realize I’ve sidetracked, and then those seven-hundred or so words will get chucked into the cuttings document and I write a new letter much more easily to the end. If I need to, I can always retrieve them (but I usually don’t).

To this end, I want to offer you some practical advice to invite you outside the scaffolding. The first being that you should find a way to write without deleting anything. Backspace is the liberated first draft’s enemy. The easiest way to do this would be to write your novel by hand rather than on a word processor. Designate a special notebook and write through your scenes.

If you can’t write by hand for any reason, do the same thing but with a word processor. To make it difficult for you to go back and rewrite everything from the beginning, take your scenes one at a time, but do so out of chronological order.

Pace yourself, too. Don’t write everything at once if you can help it. Give yourself an achievable daily goal, like a scene, three pages a day, or some smaller unit you know would be possible for you. Forgive yourself on days you can’t get to writing. Spacing out the work over time will help you stay energized in the writing and allow time to intuit decisions that can be addressed the next day.

The goal is not to rush through the first draft, but to accumulate as much as possible, however long it takes. By the time you get to typing up the notebook, you’ll have more than you need to choose from, and it’ll be easy to cut the rest.

You are the only one who can say what your fears are before asking how you want to face them. But sometimes you need to give yourself room to write whatever you want, however you want to write it, in order for the real story to show up. The throat-clearings, the dead-ends, and even overwritten characters leave their traces on your final draft. They are stepping stones for that view from the river; they are old runes hidden in a dead end.

The particular peculiars of a good work come from the fact that it’s a palimpsest of plans and impulses. Any art that’s worth making has a morass of uncertainty that must be waded through in order for the work to be complete. You have no choice but to dive into uncertainties. But you can choose between welcoming it and fearing it, and let the work, and you, grow beyond anything you could have ever planned.