EricDalen.com

Are you worried about your spelling, or if you're using the correct font or proper line spacing?

That's a good thing.  Because everything matters.

Except . . . ready for it? . . . in the 1st Draft.

If you're in the 1st Draft, fahgetaboutit.  Just write.  Let the creativity flow.

It's ultimately important for you to get the story down.  The story, after all, is what you're there for.

When you're ready to work on the 2nd Draft, that's when you can go all anal.  Nit pick, question, rearrange, cut, add, tweak, twist and recycle.  But in the 1st Draft, just run with it.  And don't look back.

One analogy might be like moving day.  When you bring the boxes and furniture in, you put them in the appropriate room, maybe in or near the place they need to be, but you don't unpack each box one by one as you unload it from the truck.  That would take forever.  No, as you take a box marked "Bedroom" off the truck, you take it to the bedroom, set it on the floor, and go back to the truck for the next box.  You don't unpack the first one, place the knickknacks and alarm clock exactly where they need to be while 157 other boxes sit on the truck, waiting for their turn.  No, you go back to the truck and take the next box to the room where it needs to go.  Once everything's unloaded off the truck, then you can begin to arrange, put away and decorate.

Your 1st Draft is similar.  Throw everything in the appropriate room, and decorate it later.  Correct spelling, use the proper font and fix up various plot points and characters once the truck is unloaded.

I have a client who spent roughly a year working on the Prologue.  I tried to convince him that, really, the Prologue comes last.  It should be written after the book proper.  That way, the Prologue can be flavored to suit the taste of the "finished" book.  But instead, he wrote a little, played with different fonts, inserted little boxes with clever quotes or artwork that he felt were important to the look and feel of his project.  He'd send me a copy, then a few days later, I'd get an email asking I delete the previous one because he had "updated" it and it was now much better.  The only difference I could tell was the font size had changed and a couple new boxes were added.

Finally, I met him for breakfast and said this is all lovely, but it has nothing to do with his book.  "Please," I practically begged him, "write the fucking book.  The publisher -- if you ever get around to completing a manuscript that a publisher would want to publish -- would probably cut the stupid Prologue anyway."

He was shocked.  And crestfallen.  But he got it.  A month later, he turned in Chapter 1.

Maybe you're not quite that bad -- I certainly hope not -- but I've found myself sometimes going back to "work on" the first chapter instead of focusing on the road ahead.  Occasionally, I come up with a better opening line, or re-envision that first scene, and I feel compelled to return to the beginning and rework it.  I suppose this wouldn't be bad if it only took a few minutes or maybe a couple of hours, but when I find myself still revising Chapter 1 five days later, and the rest of the novel is a vast, empty wasteland of nothing, I'm not doing myself -- or the manuscript -- any favors.

Do yourself a favor, and complete the 1st Draft.  You'll have plenty of time to agonize over every little detail for the weeks and months to come.

-----

Got a question for The Writing Freak?
Email it to thewritingfreak@gmail.com

Follow The Writing Freak on Twitter!
http://www.twitter.com/TheWritingFreak