on First drafts and trust
So I’m writing two books this year - a YA crime thriller, and the second book in a junior fantasy adventure series.
Anyway, I’m officially halfway through my YA book. As in, I’m 30,000 words into it, and if the average YA book is about 60, 000, then I’m going well. At this point, you’d think you could heave a great big sigh of relief and satisfaction, and feel like you’re really accomplishing something, right?
Er, not really.
It’s at this point in the story where I start to worry if I’m doing it right. I start to get all angst-ridden about whether the plot is too mundane or boring, or too complicated, or whether I’ve got the right amount of suspense/action/romance/whatever into it. I also wonder, at this point, whether I could be doing something a bit more interesting with the style - could it be more cross-cut? Am I using the right POV? Is this really an interesting subject for a YA audience? Why am I writing this book?
My main concerns are often about narrative. Whether I’ve made it too tight, or whether it’s too meandering, or whether it’s plausible. And I’m constantly reading in the genre, so I’m getting a lot of temptation, of the “oh, wow, this book by John Marsden/Sonya Hartnett/Suzanne Collins is so brilliant! Maybe I should be trying something more along those lines…” kind.
My partner was saying that he finds it hard to write something if he doesn’t know where it’s going. Equally difficult is if you doubt whether the path you’re going on is the correct one. I guess at this point, all I can do is rely on faith. I have to trust that I had a good idea, and the idea is still good, and now I’m charging along that road at full pelt, so I’ve just got to believe that it’s going in the right direction and hope for the best. I just have to trust that my instincts are good.
That’s not as easy to do as it is to write down, believe me.
So what I’ve returned to, to give me faith are a couple of things. I go back to the plot summary that I wrote out (wow, I’m so organised!), and re-read it, and make sure it’s tight enough, and I can see from that that I’m going in approximately the right direction. And I go back to my conviction that I’m producing good work, at a fast rate, and that at the end of this process I’ll have a 60,000 word pile of clay, that I can shape and reshape and sculpt into the final form that I want. And I remember that without that initial clay to work with, I don’t have anything, so it’s best just to put my head down, and work, and then keep that old mantra uppermost in my mind - you can edit later!! I recall that there’s nothing so satisfying as a 2nd draft/3rd draft/further draft.
Sometimes I re-read over my old fanfic/original pieces, to remind myself that yes, I can write.
And I cross my fingers and toes, and try to get enough sleep, and stop worrying so much about it.