The first draft is you and your idea’s courtship. It’s the time when you try each other out, let things happen as they will. It flows organically out of your creative center, and you let it come, trusting that there’s a purpose to it, that all will work out in the end and you actually have something worth keeping.
It’s clandestine, a secret lover touching glances across a crowded room. It’s stealthy, and tiptoes up on you in the shower or while you fall asleep or first wake up. It may inhabit your dreams like a phantom for months before you know enough to put pencil to paper, fingers to keyboard. It may be the most fleeting of images or a particular arrangement of words, lost forever if not captured as it takes shape.
It flows out of you, with parts out of context and time, or in miraculously perfect order.
First draft writing is a kind of channeling, the opening of a window to let light and a fresh breeze stream onto the page. The page lifts and is swept onto the wind. Your mind drifts with it, floating sublime, unaccountable to the law of gravity, to rules or boundaries. It simply moves, undulating in weird gyrations, crossing bridges of light and thought into a curious netherworld, the land of What If.
Anything can happen.
There is seldom an editor in the first draft. There is no you. There is no form. There are only flickering images, an impressionist’s vision, a formless grouping of words that magically reconfigures, a stream of random events, thoughts, reasons, shapes. Words flit, restless butterflies refusing to touch down for more than a second, their existence as fleeting as the first, faint traces of a hesitant pencil on paper. A damsel fly drones through it all, wings so ephemeral they cannot exist, yet they beat the air with intensity. You know there’s a thread here. You have faith. You grasp the tail end of it and let it pull you along. You write as though your life depended on wrapping the page around this fleeting nothingness.
Then you stop. You rest. You come back and read what you’ve left on the page. You realize there’s nothing more to add. You let it rest a while longer.
You read again. You think, “My God! What am I going to do with this mess?”
Hmm. A very romantic view of writing — creative fiction, I presume, and a short piece at that. It fits with the romanticized view many people have of the writing life, or of being a Writer. It’s often found in groups of people who want to be published Authors, but rebel at the actual work that writing entails. I’ve used the capitalizations deliberately for the words Writer and Author to be read with deep, sonorous, reverence. With all due respect to Vessels of the Muse.
O.K. Here’s another possibility. You conceive an idea for a story (any length). Put it into a sentence. A paragraph. A synopsis. Outline it. It sounds good. Let it flow. If the process balks at any point, maybe it isn’t such a good idea. You can always back up and try again or move on to something more productive.
Comment by Georganna Hancock — 4/20/2005 @ 9:25 am
My right brain is filled butterflies too…give me a damsel fly anyday.
Comment by J — 4/20/2005 @ 9:16 pm
Dazzled again with your insights. Were you spying on me?
There are so many times after a writing frenzy (which all my first drafts are), when my pen leaves a smudge of words to read, and I wonder, “Who wrote this stuff – couldn’t have been me?”
Writing can be a mystical experience, for certain, except for the occasional research my sort of writing requires. At those times I am especially intentional, and I become the seeker of words rather than the words seeming to seek me. But I must add a disclaimer. Sometimes the channeling, or whatever, hiccups in my head like a car engine trying to ignite. I pause with empty spaces, tapping my pen while trying to divine the ‘perfect’ words. Urr, urr, urr my thoughts will try to connect – stall – I’ll try again, urr, urr, urr – and just before my battery dims, the words connect and jumpstart with a pleasing hum and empower me to move forward.
My shower is also a place for inspiration – this is true for many writers/authors. Is it all that nakedness? And often, I literally jump out of bed (throw on a robe because of all that nakedness again), because while sleeping, an idea has jumped into my head.
Though I live many of the experiences you mentioned, you also know firsthand that the process is a lot of hard word and takes a lot of determination, guts, discipline and thank-yous to the universe when the assignment, sentence, paragraph, or synopsis is imbued with someone’s misconceived notion of romance – it ain’t romantic at all, but it is satisfying with a different brand of passion and I say we are the fortunate ones.
So while I toil and rant and rave and read rejections as though they were Dear John letters, the windfall of misconceived romance disguises my hard work and tricks some people into a harmless deception of their own making. Heck, sometimes I romance the notion of a paycheck, insurance benefits and stock options. I say let them dream. I have my own dreams rapt in words.
Oh, and by the way, I am a writer and an author. In my crumpled ordinary Webster’s, the two words define each other.
Comment by Reenie — 4/21/2005 @ 6:50 am