Haha. I think I have to accept it will take more than 2, 3, or even 4 drafts before I'm done. This thing is a mess. Good way to see it.
I don't hate them. But I don't love them either. For me, they are a beautiful mess. They are seeds--prototype--of a better story that I would like to share.
Thank you all for the replies. For whatever reason, they helped. Some things just clicked tonight and now I'm in love with my first draft, waha.
Hi, to me writing a first draft is as important as successful draft itself; everything should have a start. A writings sometimes are conveyed by the unconscious mind that stores life experiences of the individual. what seems to him wrong, may appear successful and vice versa. Good luck.
I'm in a process of drafting as I go along. The first version is often bland so bad I cringe. But chapters later, I go back and ideas come to mind, or I realize that moving a sentence up or down works better, or I come up with a better line for something, or whatever. Over time, it starts to look better and eventually it settles nearly or completely so. Once I figured this out, the negative emotions drifted away. I'm kinda writing the whole thing concurrently. I can think of a lot of analogies; painting a picture, filming a movie pre-CGI, building a house, dating. I'm not kidding. The first versions read like a Uwe Boll movie script nourished with cheap whiskey reincarnated into the body of a half-brained octopus on bath salts and viagra. After a few months of going back over and over, it looks like something better than I'm capable of writing and stuns me a bit.
Of course, that is why editing and beta reading exist. Then again sometimes it is never quite what you want it to be.
I've come to realise that my first draft is always going to suck and that is ok. It's never going to be the amazingly written story that I hope for straight away. It's going to be a mess. Things won't connect and bits will be missing. However, getting it out there on the page then makes it easier to see the problems and work on fixing them in the following drafts. Since I've excepted that I find it a lot easier to get my first draft done. I've even started to enjoy it. It's a mess but its the first step towards something that will (hopefully) become great.
Finishing a first draft is one of the best feelings you can give yourself. I did it. It's out there. I'm a writer now. Then comes the hard work, because unless you are some sort of writing genius, it will need work. Sometimes lots of work, with whole sections completely revised, new sections added in, some of your favourite bits removed because they don't move the story along the way they should, etc etc. I would never say I hate my first draft, although it can make me laugh, later on. But that moment, of writing 'the end' after a long, hard slog of getting your novel 'done.' That feeling is sublime. Enjoy it. Then move on.
I'm with @jannert. Finishing a first draft is a milestone, and a lot of writer wannabees never get there. The fact that there is a lot more work ahead doesn't change that.
I'm always terrified to read my first draft. I'm afraid I'll discover that the story is actually horrible and I was too busy word-vomiting it out during the original creation to notice. And it doesn't change, no matter how many times I remind myself that first drafts are never as good as the end product. Eventually I push through the terror and work page by page, realizing that I do have good content (even if I am notorious for slipping up in ways spell check can't catch, like writing "check" when I meant "cheek"). But even though it scares me and I'm certain I've just finished the worst story mankind ever deigned to put on paper, I still finished a draft. And sometimes I have to remind myself of that when I'm dragging my feet and putting off editing. Those who tell themselves they're going to write a book and write an abominable first draft still did eons more than the person that always says they should write a book and never do.
Honestly, if you can finish a draft, you're miles ahead of most people. Myself included. I'm getting there though, like anybody else I suppose. But yeah: you've got to work. As Ernest Hemingway once said, "Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can't get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You've got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it's your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself." Bernard Malamud said something similar. "The first draft of anything is suspect unless one is a genius." And I'd add to that "or lucky". I can tell you this. My first drafts of articles that I wrote for my high-school newspaper? Garbage compared to the final product. There'd be so many times where even I had to ask myself, "What the hell was I thinking?" or "Was I even thinking at all?" But being honest with yourself, and accepting *good* critique (and knowing how to differentiate that from *bad* "critique") is so important. I've got a lot of thanks to give to my two editors, who were students themselves, and of course to my journalism teacher. P.S. If you knew how many times I re-read each post I make on here, and how many edits I go through, you'd shake your head. The first draft of my posts almost never survive, let alone my first draft of any serious piece of fiction or non-fiction I'm working on. That is, if said drafts don't become miscarriages.
I'm always editing my posts on here, too. Sometimes it's embarrassing, when I go back and decide to change something, and find somebody has already quoted the original. Eeeks. I like that line from Hemingway ...that readers should not remember a story as something they read, but rather as something that happened to themselves. (Mind you, I suppose that depends on what happens in the story. )
I recently read that the first draft is the writer telling him/herself the story. I think there is a lot of truth in that.
This is why I try to make my first drafts as polished as possible. I hate editing because after my first draft I already know the story and it's boring to have to go over it again and again. If I can get it out right the first time, when I'm still telling myself the story, then I won't have to spend so much time on a story I already know.
I think the artistry of first drafts is the most genuine. Yes, it may lack coherence and be hard to understand, but it's an instance of introspection accomplished through writing. I like to compare it to the notebooks of scientists - the art not only comes from introspection but also comes from the incoherence; the complex thought processes of a human being. Here's an image of a page of Darwin's notes:
Is there ever a point in your first draft that you think to yourself, as you're writing, "damn, this [character/story/plot/etc] just isn't working. I'm done!" How bad does a first draft have to be before you ditch it? Or alternatively, is there such a thing as a draft that is bad beyond fixing? How it relates to me: Recently I started up again on my novel again, and I just can't help but think that everything is so contrived. Characters, storyline... Theoretically, I still like the story idea, the theme, the locations (Toronto, Paris, Venice), the general concept and I believe a story like this one needs to be told. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that, from the very beginning, the plot was ambiguous, but the characters were supposed to be the bread and butter of this story. I never had a real solid idea of where I wanted to take it, just a good idea of the characters and the theme. I put a lot of thought into this, and I'm sad to think there is nothing to show for it. Should I plough through this and then refine the piece until the elements are no longer contrived?
This happens to me a lot, once at 60k words, once at 40k words, and most recently at 4k. 60k- was my first real attempt at writing in years. I actually liked the story, but when I returned to the piece with a more discerning eye it suffered head hopping, too many tropes to wave a stick at, purple prose, passive sentences... I just came to the realisation that it required far too much work to get it into a decent shape. 40k- It was a post-apocalyptic piece (the apocalypse being more of a bloody revolution) and in places I was soap-boxing about the evils of rampant capitalism and the plutocracy that had caused the fall of civilisation. There are parts of it that I like, but there is nothing more tedious than someone preaching at you. 4k- I quit it literally a few days ago because I disliked the piece and everyone in it, and that was showing in the declining quality of my writing... in the end I just could not bring myself to write any more of it. I realised quite suddenly with each of them that they were not working, and I abandoned them equally as quickly.
Sure. Absolutely. This doesn't happen to me because of "badness". It happens to me because the train of creativity peters out and stops, and I just can't make it move forward in any way that feels genuine, or inspired, or has that dynamic of idea leading to idea that is what I think of as being "in the groove". But... I never throw anything away. All these words I wrote are my words. They can be used again.
I'm with @Wreybies in never throwing anything away. There are stories I've stopped writing, but at least in my mind they're all just "on hold", not permanently discarded. With me, a lot of the time I put things on hold when I don't think I currently have the skill or finesse to do what I wanted with the piece. But I hope that I'll be able to come back to it later, when I'm a stronger writer, and do the idea justice. (Even if I'm wrong about this, it certainly makes it much more emotionally acceptable for me when I decide to stop writing something). All that said--if you find you are NEVER finishing anything, there may be a deeper issue you need to look at. I won't speculate as to what that might be, given the limited information available.
What you might need to do is throw a completely new element into the story. Throw in another character. Switch point of view. Take something you've made happen and turn it on its head. (What if that didn't happen? Or what if it didn't turn out the way you originally wrote it?) Give one of your main characters a handicap they didn't have before. I'm not talking 'quirk' here, I'm talking real handicap. Either permanent or temporary, but a story-changing thing. Put them in a wheelchair. Make them blind. Make them unable to see colours. Make them unable to walk more than 50 yards at a time without having to take a rest. Change the character's age. Change the era your story is set. I'd advocate something like this—some radical change—rather than abandoning a story you still think has potential. But don't start writing immediately. Think about it. Have a good daydream about it. Take long walks, etc. Work actively at it in your mind, but wait till you get the 'eureka' moment before you start writing again. While I try never to say 'never,' I do advocate NOT abandoning stories. That can become a very bad habit. It's better if you train yourself to make a bad story work, or come up with a way to fix a problem you encounter. That, in itself, can be the source of a lot of pleasure, believe me.
So, if you still like the story, like writing it, and desire to continue writing it - I would keep writing it. I don't think it's a good idea to retcon an idea just because you think it feel's contrived - I think everyone probably thinks that about every story at some point. Now, if it doesn't interest you and you just don't want to do it anymore, then you may want to reconsider it, or consider taking a break. But I don't think it's good idea to decide that something you enjoy is somehow conceptually flawed and that you're therefore obligated to put it down. I struggled with that a lot starting my current novel project (which is my first) - I took a lot of heavy criticism and did have some people tell me that major elements were conceptually flawed. That's actually why I originally joined this forum and why my first few posts are basically an embarrassing hamlet act asking whether I HAD to take advice from critiquers who made that claim. The short answer is, especially if your a first-time novelist with an uncompleted draft, you might not have enough material yet to make a solid judgement on the piece and where it's going. I know mine shifted direction and theme several times before the end - it started out as a political drama about the nature of truth and ended up as a character study on the toxicity of ambition. That, and if this is a first novel, there is value in pushing through, so that you learn how to get to the end of a novel (which is a way different skill than writing short pieces) and can use that to write a better second novel. So, I'd say the most important question to ask is whether or not you personally want to keep writing. If the answer is yes, keep going - and maybe seek out other writers for critique and development so that you get a better perspective on your own work.
