Drafting, Two Ways

or: that time I wrote 10,000 words in Colorado

I tend to write the way I cook: slowly, with great attention to detail, cleaning up as I go. I guess the one major difference is I’m great at sticking to recipes and horrible at sticking to outlines. (Hmmm…will set that aside for further self-analysis later.)

In general, I'd like to think my methods pay off with quality results I am proud of most of the time, but I've also learned that holding myself to a high, perfectionist bar often leads to burnout…and takeout.

Similarly with my writing, my toxic trait is that I sometimes struggle with feeling like if I can’t come to my desk brimming with inspiration, armed with the time, ingredients and environment I need to let an idea slowly simmer until it boils over onto the page, each sentence that flows from my fingers a chef’s kiss of a thought—then why even bother showing up at all?

As a result of my slow, stubborn ways, two things tend to happen:

1. My writing practice lacks routine and instead tends to exist in frantic waves of feast and famine—madly racking up words when inspiration strikes, and letting days or weeks pass me by when it doesn’t. As a result, it takes me a loooong time to finish a draft and I feel shame over all the hours I let slip away, staring at a blank screen or no screen at all, letting this intangible fantasy of perfection become the enemy of “good enough for now.” Oh how many “good enough” words I could have had by now.

2. When I do finally(!!) finish a draft, however painstakingly long it takes me, it tends to be pretty polished. Which is great—if those words survive revision. Not so great it they’re the 100,000 words I cut entirely from my first book, never to be seen again. All those pretty, shiny words, lying limp on the cutting room floor. Sigh… It’s kind of like dressing up in an evening gown for a night on the sofa.

From what I’ve gathered, writers tend to fall into one of two categories when it comes to drafting: slow, polished drafts, and quick, messy ones. (My friend Sophie may be a literary unicorn as her drafting is both incredibly fast AND incredibly polished….but I digress. Most of us cannot be Sophie, so pick a lane.)

I tend to fall into the SLOW lane. With cooking, with writing, with reading, with getting out the door on time for absolutely anything, my husband will attest. And it’s wearing on me. I want to allow myself to be a little fast and sloppy. Like maybe cook without wiping the counter down first, or write without knowing what the hell I’m going to say. Some of the best meals and books are probably made that way.

Last month I attended a wonderful writing retreat with four other women in the Colorado mountains. I CRAVED this time away—a thousand miles from my laundry pile, my dishwasher, my needy children (love you, kids! you just have so. many. needs.). I knew that I needed to mentally reset and dive back into the manuscript I had been stalled out on for weeks. On the way to the airport I told Aaron, “I’m not spending all this time and money just to have writers block in another state.” Hell or high water, I was determined to WRITE.

And write I did. 10,000 words in three days. For those unaccustomed to these metrics, that’s about an eighth of a novel. Meaning, if I kept up that pace I could have written an entire novel in about three weeks. Ha! I had never ever written so much, so quickly, in my life. Was it the most amazing, inspired, polished work of my life? Absolutely not. But was it a starting point I could build off of? YES.

My foray into this experimental “fast drafting” has been causing my head to spin. My thoughts have ranged from “You’re ruining your book!” to “This is what you should have been doing all along!” In writing, sometimes it feels like contradictions are the only constant.

I don’t have the answer to “What’s the right way to draft?” I don’t think there is one. I just know that for me, there was something empowering and revelatory about breaking my own self-imposed mold and allowing myself to cook up a storm in a messy kitchen.

I imagine some significant revising and visits to that cutting room floor lie in this draft’s future, but I can handle that. What these most recent chapters may lack in artful sentences I like to linger over like a fine wine, they make up for in momentum and continuity, I hope. A stream of consciousness linked over days, not stretched out over months.

The experiment continues, but I now know that I can do it. I can write 10,000 words propelled by sheer will and very little planning, and I can build a story that way. As the saying goes, you can’t edit a blank page.

Are you a tortoise, hare, or unicorn when it comes to laying the foundation for a new project? Have you ever stretched your comfort zone and forced yourself to fight your nature and do the opposite, just to see what happens? Please share in the comments!

CURRENTLY READING:

In Happiness Falls, a father of three goes missing and his non-verbal autistic son might be the only one who knows what really happened. A fascinating exploration of language, loyalty, and the assumptions we make about strangers and those we know best.

A great choice for your next audiobook, Listen for the Lie follows a woman who agrees to take part in a podcast with the goal of solving a murder she is accused of committing.

CURRENTLY WATCHING:

With a title like Baby Reindeer, you know it’s going to be weird. And British comedian/writer/star Richard Gadd’s true story about that time he was stalked by an intensely unforgettable middle-aged woman does not disappoint. There are no babies or reindeer as far as I know, but I can’t stop watching this trainwreck of social faux pas gone very very wrong…

As always, thanks for reading!

Happy May and Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms!

Xo, Beth