Bang Out Your First Draft
From Idea to Manuscript in Four Simple (But Not Easy) Steps
A couple weeks ago—all the way back in January—I wrote about the first step to getting published, which is, to have a completed manuscript. If you have a story you want to tell, and you want that telling to get published, you have to write it down. Today’s article is about how to sit down and, like the title says, bang out that first draft of your short story, novel, or nonfiction manuscript.
I don’t choose words carelessly and when I say you should bang something out I absolutely mean it in the sense of doing whatever it is hastily, recklessly, and in an ill-considered manner. Ill-considered? Yes, I mean that. Stop considering it. Consider less. Write more. Write some garbage.
“But I don’t want to write garbage, I want to write something good!” To write something good you have to write some garbage first. I’ve never seen a first draft of anything that didn’t need work. The best first draft of anything I ever saw couldn’t be characterized as “garbage,” exactly, but it still needed a lot of work. Most first drafts are going to be pretty bad. If it’s your first first draft? It’s going to be bad. Accept that. In acceptance lies peace.
Once you have a garbage first draft you get to decide whether you want to continue working on it to make your garbage less garbage-y and less garbage-y over time until one day you look down and have a good final draft in your hands. Or, alternately, if you want to throw it away and start on something else with the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. A lot of first drafts go into the garbage. The first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man went into the fire. You can read it. Nora Barnacle pulled it out of the fire and it’s published under the title Stephen Hero and guess what? It’s trash.
If you want to tell a story but you’re not sure how to get from where you are now to a place where you have all of that story down on paper, I can help you out a bit with that. I can’t supply the motivation you need to sit down and write. I can’t give you the story to tell (though I can help you with getting ideas if you’re fresh out). I can’t make you sit down and focus on writing till it’s done; I’m not the boss of you. But I can give you some tips and pointers from my personal experience with writing, working with writers in various writing groups, and years of working with authors, to help you get started writing and keep going till you get to the end.
There are two really challenging parts to writing the first draft of a manuscript and then the rest is really easy. The hard parts are:
Starting your manuscript.
Finishing your manuscript.
It probably sounds like I’m being facetious, but in reality: Only partly being facetious.
Some people view an empty page as an invitation while others view it as an ominous threat. Some of us probably feel both ways at different times in our lives. You might, perhaps, feel both ways at the same time. If you’re someone who sees an empty page and can’t wait to fill it with words and you don’t feel any reservations, then you might not need this article. I envy you, if that’s you.
For me, facing the blank page can be really intimidating. But seeing as I have to do it twice a week at a bare minimum just to keep Shelf Life running, I’ve got some good coping strategies. Herewith are the four that I employ the most—for all types of writing projects, including the one you’re reading right this very moment.
Don’t Overcommit
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot before the whistle blows to start the race. You need to commit to writing your story down but you need to make sure you don’t overcommit because if you do, you’re going to intimidate yourself right out of starting.
A good sign that you have overcommitted is that you can’t get your mind focused on sitting down to actually begin. The moment you get ready to start working, you remember something else you had to do. That email you forgot to send? Dishes you left in the sink? Dog needs a walk? Nothing makes my brain remember stuff I need to take care of like stressing myself out with a big commitment.
A lot of the advice out there for writers is to write about whatever you’re most passionate about. The idea that grabs hold of you and just won’t let go until you write it down. That’s the advice you’re going to get everywhere else. If you have that idea that’s incredibly exciting and that you just can’t seem to shake, but you can’t make yourself get started on writing it, here’s my advice for you:
Write. Something. Else.
I hear a lot of people who want to write tell me that they have a story they want to tell but they’ve never really written anything before and they’re not sure they can tackle such a big and complicated story. Or they worry that they won’t be able to do it justice. If that’s you, then the common advice to write whatever you’re most excited about is not going to work. You’re going to sit there looking at this blank page thinking that you’re going to mess up your story. Or you’ll get started, and after a few pages you’ll go “Oh no, this is garbage, this is not what I envisioned for my masterpiece!” and you’ll get discouraged and give up.
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa at the beginning of his career. Leonard Cohen didn’t write “Hallelujah” till he was fifty. Many Leonards, and in fact people with all kinds of names, get better at things the more they practice. It’s not unreasonable to assess your writing skills and experience and choose a project that fits them right now over the project that you envision as your greatest work.
If you start with an idea that is further from your heart, you might be less inclined to edit as you write. You might feel less insecure about your ability to do the story justice. If you aren’t sure you’re ready to write a whole novel, then you might start with a short story or a novella. For instance, if your ultimate goal is to write your memoir, perhaps you could take an event from your personal history and tell it in the form of a short story to try the memoir on for size. There are a lot of famous novels out there that have been adapted from short stories—Ender’s Game and The Edible Woman, for example, just off the top of my head.
So even if your ultimate goal is to write a novel out of the story you are most passionate about, don’t let anyone tell you that has to be your goal right now and if that’s not what you’re doing then you’re not a real writer. If working on the project you see as “your baby” motivates you, then go for it. If it intimidates you, try to figure out what particularly about it is intimidating and resize that aspect. Commit to something that feels challenging but attainable.
Define Success
In all endeavors, not just writing, it’s critical to know your success condition. How else will you know when you’re done? You might say to yourself, “Well, this is simple—I’ll be done when I have a first draft.” Is it that simple though?
I urge you to give some consideration to—and maybe do a bit of research into—what a first draft should look like for the type of project you’ve decided to do. What is your goal for this particular draft, and what is your ultimate goal for the overall project in an ideal world?
If your goal is to write a complete, full-length novel manuscript, make sure you understand what “complete, full-length novel” means. Are you writing a memoir? Then you’re going to need to target about 60,000 to 80,000 words. Fantasy novel? That’s going to be longer. Middle-grade novel? Shorter. Got more story to tell than the seemingly arbitrary word count the industry wants to impose on you? Or less story? That’s fine—manuscripts grow and shrink during editing. Just be mindful of where the target is.
If you have an ultimate goal to sell a manuscript, make sure you’re working toward something that is “in bounds” for the type of writing you’re doing. It doesn’t matter how great your short story is if it’s 12,000 words and the magazine you want to submit to only considers stories up to 7,500. Wrote a 300,000 word behemoth? Nah, you wrote a trilogy. Figure out where to break it up.
Get Prepared
I’ll preface this section by saying that not everybody feels the same way I do about preparing to write a manuscript. Some people are “pantsers,” meaning they like to write by the seat of their pants, without doing any preparation ahead of time. If that’s you, you probably aren’t reading this article in the first place because you are busy writing. To be clear, not everyone needs to do the same level of prep before they start writing, but I do think that most people can benefit from doing at least some.
Before I sit down and start drafting a manuscript, I need to make some decisions, do a little research, and put in some writing-adjacent work—but not in that order.
The ancillary writing comes first, for me at least. I need to sketch out my plot from end to end, not so that I know every little detail of what’s going to happen but so I can make sure I have all the characters I need, for example. Ever get to act 3 and realize your plot requires a character you don't have, so you have to go back to act 1 and put them in? That has happened to me more than once. Outlining will usually save you from this.
I also need to know the general arc of my story so that I can figure out who the narrator is going to be, and from what point of view the story will be told. Will an omniscient third-person narration shift point of view from character to character, as in A Game of Thrones? Or would the story be better served by a limited third-person narrator who can only tell the story from one point of view, like in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Can I tell the whole story with a single first-person narrator like Katniss from The Hunger Games? Or do I need multiple first-person narrators, like in Gone Girl? Whoever I choose to narrate, they need to be able to access all the information needed to tell the story. If there’s information that is critical for the reader to know, but that my narrator can’t easily get, I have to plan for that.
I pretty much always need to do some research about my setting and characters, too. Even if I were going to set something in Maryland, where I’ve lived most of my life, I’d need to do some information gathering. Science fiction or fantasy setting? Yes, even then. You’ll have to look into the weirdest stuff. What causes celestial bodies to be tidally locked to one another? What factors does a society need to spontaneously develop agriculture? What kind of skills and education would a piano tuner need to have? Or a corn farmer?
Few things put a damper on my writing quicker than realizing mid-sentence that I’m missing some critical information and now I have to stop drafting to go figure something out. Or realizing late in the manuscript that I didn’t lay the groundwork early for something important later on, and having to backtrack before I can push forward. Learn from my fail. Have a plan—at least a sketch of a plan—going in.
Build a Schedule
So now you know what you have to write in terms of the story you’re going to tell and the approximate length you want your finished first draft to be. You know what kind of preparation you have to do to get to a good place to start drafting. The last things you have to factor in are:
How much time can you devote to drafting and ancillary writing tasks on a regular basis? And
How much work product is reasonable to expect from each writing session? And
When do you want to finish your draft?
Not everybody can scrounge up time to write every single day, and not everybody wants to. I do a lot of writing and I don’t write every day. I try to but I don’t make it every day. I write most days. It’s fine. So think about how much you want to do and—again, without overcommitting—find that amount of time in your schedule. Can you devote an hour a day? Half an hour a day? An hour a few times a week? A solid two-hour writing session once a week?
Need some accountability to get it done? Find a writing buddy. I just met someone earlier today who has a cowriting group, they get together on weekends and spend two hours quietly writing together. Substack offers a similar virtual program, you can just hang out quietly on Zoom with other writers and work on your newsletters together. Do what you need to do to make yourself write during your writing sessions. This is the part I can’t help you with—I can’t make you sit down and actually do it.
So how much is a reasonable amount to expect from yourself? Is it five hundred words a session? Two hundred and fifty? Twenty-five hundred? If you haven’t tried to sustain writing momentum before, you might not already have a good sense of what’s achievable for you. Not to belabor the earlier point but don’t overcommit and discourage yourself. Start small. Set a small goal. Adjust it till you find something that’s challenging but not grueling. And keep in mind that you’re trying to set an average pace over time, you’re not giving yourself a hard-and-fast rule.
I’ve heard every strategy from writers who push themselves to get a minimum down on paper every day to those who make themself stop working while they’re on a roll to “save something for later.” Figure out what works for you and stick with that.
Finally, give yourself a deadline. Do you want to have a piece ready to enter in a contest? Or finish a complete manuscript before your fiftieth birthday? Pick a deadline and look at how the math works out. If you keep the pace you are planning on, can you complete a draft by that deadline? And, if not, what would have to change? Could you find more writing sessions between then and now? Try to pick up the pace of writing to get more output from each session? Can you budge on your deadline?
Once you’ve got your project picked, your schedule figured out, your planning and preparation done, and your success metrics defined—what’s stopping you? For a lot of people, I truly believe it’s the fear that lack of writing experience will sink them as soon as they start. They begin their first draft, get a few pages in, compare what they’ve written to their favorite published novel, and when they don’t see a parallel quality of writing they assume they just can’t do it.
Look, this is your first draft and the first draft of anything is garbage. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be good. Every plot thread doesn’t have to be tied up tight. Every character doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out and multidimensional. Every sentence doesn’t have to be beautifully crafted. Every chapter doesn’t have to be balanced. Every scene transition doesn’t have to be smooth and polished. All of those things can be handled in revision and editing.
The only thing it has to be is done.
Listen, I have important advice for editing and for life coming your way on Thursday. Don’t I usually put the writing content on Thursday and the anything else content on Tuesday? Yes I do but this week I have rearranged everything to capitalize on the sport metaphor I have for you in just two days. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it!
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