A crazy thing happened last night. Tired, after a long day of work, I sat down to what scrivener informed me was the bare minimum for making my goal of Halloween for finishing the first draft.
I wrote. And wrote. And wrote and wrote, and when I was done, I had 1300+ new words and had just finished writing the first draft of the current novel. It’s not quite as long as I’d hoped – 55k vs 60k – but this is also the first draft. It seems like its a meme going around my circles this week, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve finally come to terms with the first draft being just for me. @jamietr has a great infographic for this here. I’ve finished step one in that schema, that’s all. In the second draft, I’ll fix the plot points I didn’t know were wrong originally, as well as fill in the gaps for the characters, correct and fixate some of their personalities, etc.
But it’s done. I did it. I finished a first draft. For those curious, here’s what my writing of this novel looks like – the first data point is when I started, on August 10, through last night, October 18. I wrote every single one of those 70 days, not always a lot, as you can see, but I wrote.
So what’s next you ask? More writing, I imagine, though not on this. It has taken me a long, long time to finally understand that the first draft needs to be socked away and fermented before I look at it a second time. Everything is still too fresh, too easy to dismiss as golden when it’s a far cry away.
On to the next bit. Maybe another novel, or revisiting a past attempt. Or maybe I’ll work on some short stories, it’s about time they got the proper second treatment.