First draft is half done. I only got one speeding ticket and two warnings.

Work on the first draft has begun and continues apace. Against the technique of my last novel, where in succession I refined and refined and refined each chapter to just shy of perfection, going at about a crawl, the idea with this one is to get the whole draft onto paper as fast as possible, outrunning my internal editor and critic (chasing behind with their red pen and big black marker and paper-crumpling hands and ridicule-spouting mouths, gaining ground and losing ground and then finding a shortcut, but never actually catching up). Speed is the watchword. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It really shouldn’t be perfect. If it’s perfect then I’m not going fast enough.

Once the draft is on paper I’ll have nowhere to run. Those pesky two will be on me with all kinds of insults and corrections and notes on grammar and general abuse, but they’ll have a good sense of the whole of the story so it won’t be idle criticism. I’ll put them to work on what needs changing on a high level with their tools of destruction. They’ll hit the big areas first—character problems, arc problems, chapter problems. With the bigger problems thoroughly yelled at they’ll move onto less big ones and even less big ones and then smaller ones and then the ones smaller than the smaller ones and lastly the fine detail of the sentences.

Then, finally, at last, after all that refining and refining, I’ll finally have my draft to a point where those pesky two will insinuate that I might as well toss the whole thing into the bonfire.

After four months of staring at a wall and the waste of approximately two million sticky notes, the plot outline is done. Lest you think I should have spent the time actually writing, consider for a moment that it would have taken me somewhere around ten years (and don’t think I’m exaggerating, either) of writing the long way to get where my plot is now. That doesn’t mean no more revision is needed. While the first half of the plot is solid, the second part has some vagueness and even a hole or two. But I have a lot of time to ponder the ending of the novel as I work on writing out the beginning, and I’ll probably need every second of it.

I had been riding the momentum of two or three early, solid ideas that had all on their own propelled me to the aforementioned point but which unaccountably and quite stubbornly refused to budge another step. So it seemed I needed another “big” idea or maybe a few to push or pull me the rest of the way.

These would need to be brilliant, original, earth-shattering, mind-blowing ideas of the caliber of those first conceptions, the kind of magical, wonderful, awesome, inscrutable, inspired (possibly divinely) ideas that can’t be forced into being by sheer willpower. And yet, I couldn’t just wait around mindlessly for months hoping for them to pop into my head, either. So I sat at my desk, staring at my plot, thinking about the direction of the thing without letting it know that I was thinking about the direction of the thing, and this state (considered impossible by the computation model) lasted long enough to make its point.

As I am constantly forced to relearn, ideas from the beginning of the writing process can get lodged in the back of one’s head and persist far beyond their usefulness. The story is altered in hundreds of ways to the point where it barely resembles the earliest incarnation, and yet here these silly guiding concepts are hanging on as though nothing has changed. These push you toward thinking in a certain way, which will preclude you from thinking in the right way. Luckily, if you stagnate in the computationally-impossible state for long enough you will be forced to reconsider your early ideas, and freed of certain problematic mind grapes, you will most certainly find an answer. Given enough time.

The idea that finally seems like it will work for me wasn’t divinely-inspired or even earth-shattering like I had supposed it would need to be. Actually it was just to move one element from early in the story to later in the story, which in a black-magic sort of way bifurcates the thing into two very different halves. I don’t know yet if it’s really the right thing, but if the flood of concomitant ideas is any indication, it very well could be rather close to an idea shortly removed from a conception shaped similarly to an impression hinting at a thought filliping in the back a… well, you get the idea.

Possibly the best way to plot a novel is to deface your wall with sticky notes, each note representing a scene or chapter. At a glance you can see the whole of your plot, not to mention any alternatives you have running off in tangential lines. It’s easy to move a scene or a whole contingent of ‘em, and then move them all back to where they started. The whole affair makes you feel a little bit like a general positioning miniature tanks on a map with a stick.

I’ve been marshaling the notes on my wall for a month and a half now; the process is beginning to near a point very close to a position shortly removed from a penumbra of an emanation of what some scholars believe may in fact be the midway mark, though others disagree about the interpretation and relevance of some of the source documents.

All in all, I move at a glacial pace. With a full day to operate, I can think up a sheet of ideas and doodles of snakes which are then reduced with an erratic Sharpie to about one usable scene concept. Overflowing with pride in my creativity and ingenuity, I stick up the note only to realize I affixed there more-or-less the same thing three hours ago.

Alas, it’s not all thought bubbles and sticky notes. I have to actually write out the long way on non-sticky paper the important bits of a scene to make sure the thing will actually work when expanded into prose. Typically it doesn’t at first, but I keep beating it until I have a scene idea in a few sentences worthy of being added to my epitaph and chiseled into my gravestone and finally glued to the office wall. Then, in three weeks time, when I’m working on what comes ten scenes later I realize it wasn’t epitaph-worthy after all, but it’s no biggie because the crumpled ball arcing toward the trash is only an idea, not two and a half thousand words perfected by four days of blood, sweat and tears.

When I began The Rub a debilitating worry was that my prose wouldn’t satisfy my standards. When I sat down to write I couldn’t meet the bar; I felt like my creative tissue was dried out. The struggle with The Rub finally put it into working order. Now I know with enough effort and revision I can write at a high enough level to satisfy myself, which means I don’t have to agonize about it, so I can focus on more important things.

I’m close to halfway done with outlining the plot of the next novel, currently known as Untitled. When I began The Rub I didn’t believe in plotting too much ahead, nor would I have been able to if I had wanted. I had no idea what sorts of scenes I could write or how to grow a story. Now I do. And now I know I need to plot because it’s like writing three drafts without all the waste. It’s one more lesson built on top of many wrong avenues I had to take. I keep trying new things: some don’t work, others become instrumental to my writing process.

Though there are many other things I could mention, from pacing to tension to voice, I don’t want to bore you too much more—let me just say, lastly, that though at first glance it may seem paradoxical, the biggest benefit of the failure is confidence. I did something I hadn’t done before, even if it wasn’t all that good, and now I know I can do it again (but much better). I learned a million little things that I can apply to the next one. I’ll only get better. The next novel will be great—and if it isn’t, then the next one or the one after that. It’s only a matter of persistence.

Thinking of the line
Of snow-draped pine
I pine and wine
And sometimes rhyme
All for a warmer clime.
The doctor, a friend of mine,
Saying into his recorder
“Seasonal poetical disorder”
Writes out an order.
Writes, “Sun lamps, Vitamin D.”
But the remedy, unfortunately
As you can see
Hasn’t much helped me.

(Can you tell I like taking pictures of stacks of paper? I like holding them in my hands, too. I like fanning them between my fingers. I like smelling them.)

At long last the first draft of The Rub is done. It’s shorter than anticipated, and the last chapters are rather rushed. But it’s done. It feels good to be done with something, even if I did cheat a little bit.

The end is incredibly awful, and the beginning isn’t very good, and neither is the middle. Almost by definition a first draft is bad, but not this bad. I wouldn’t wish the reading of it upon my worst enemy, not even Ross. But like I said, even as bad as it is, it feels good to have it done.

What do I do next? I don’t know for sure. Perhaps I will work on the next draft or perhaps I will take a break from this and work on something totally new. I don’t know yet. But that’s the exciting thing about being done with this draft.

Today The Rub, at 28,626 words, surpasses my previous novel draft of December, which at 28,344 words was somewhat shy of the third I had claimed for it. That’s a net of 282 words—not bad for seven and a half months of work.

Back in February it was a difficult decision to start over. Now, with the two documents at about the same length and The Rub in a state more or less what I had envisioned for it when I restarted, it’s a good time to sit down and consider how the new novel stacks up against its predecessor, which is precisely why I goaded Ross, the only individual unlucky enough to read my drafts, to proclaim, “Yes, Aaron, starting over was the right decision.” But he wouldn’t be goaded. He doesn’t care for goading.

So I’ll just have to toot my own horn and say, yes, self, it was the right decision. Totally right. Couldn’t have been righter, self, if I do say so myself.

Next week: Why I’m throwing away everything I’ve written and starting over from scratch

In February, obeying the rules of what they call the Balenchesky System in writing classes, I threw away my novel draft (then about a third done), deciding to keep (more-or-less) one third of the storyline. I couldn’t wait to get started on a new beginning. In March, having tried out five or six first chapters, I was so thoroughly disgruntled with beginnings that I swore them off, claiming an intention to simply not have one. In April I wrote Chapter 2. By the middle of May, in a change of fates, I had not only written a beginning but completed the first four chapters of what had come to be known tentatively as The Rub. On the last day of June I finally decided to blog about it.

Beginnings are hard. I used to think beginnings were easy, but that’s just because all I ever wrote were beginnings. In a whoosh of inspiration I’d splash across the page a brilliant beginning for a tale—probably the most brilliantist thing ever—but come to think of it, it wasn’t really a beginning at all (even if brilliant), because what kind of beginning exists without the other bits, the meat of the story?

But it turns out the more I know about a story at the start, the more raw data I have to obsess about. Unfortunately there’s no opportunity to blithely splash down whatever comes to mind. What I mean is: I splashed down five or six or ten beginnings, and none of them were any good. When it came to The Rub, I obsessed a lot.

Disclaimer: If your eyes go all crossed trying to follow this, skip to the next paragraph. It’s okay. I would.

With my beginning chapters I needed to (according to all those beginner’s writing books) introduce the main characters, establish the setting, provide a fair sense of the mood of the story, suggest the coming action, grab the reader, establish (I ran out of synonyms) point-of-view, and be funny. Unfortunately, when it came to my beginning, these things conflicted with each other in myriad surprising and aggravating ways. I wanted to impart a sense of the status quo of my character’s lives before the disrupting action of the novel, but it turns out that status quo stuff is incredibly dull; I wanted to jump straight into the action, because that’s what is interesting (or at least I hope it is), but if I started with the action there was no context and things fell flat. I wanted the first chapter to be funny, but since the comedy comes from characters and situations, the first chapter can’t be funny, because our reader doesn’t know the characters and no situations have really gotten underway. To make the first chapter funny I’d have to write a scene with broad humor, but that scene, in my many attempts, never really worked toward establishing enough of the other requirements. I wanted to grab the reader, but I didn’t want to do anything cheesy, like starting with some cliffhanger. (I hate that!) I wanted to win the trust of my reader with my best, most poetic, most wonderfully descriptive writing, but that sort of thing can really bog down the chapters that are supposed to do all that grabbing of the reader I mentioned. I couldn’t really use my protagonist’s point-of-view, because… well, because! And on and on and on. And then on some more. I forget now what all the conflicts were. But, on and on and on they went, and on and on and on, and so on.

For those of you who skipped straight to this paragraph (which is most of you), congratulations. Smart. Anyway, to get you skippers up to speed, suffice it to say that there was an obsessive’s dream of complications to be wrangled when crafting my beginning. So what I did, as I said earlier, was swear off beginnings. I simply wouldn’t have one. Who needs ‘em? So then I obsessed over Chapter 2 for quite a while, and ultimately (no fabrication or even exaggeration here) I cut off the beginning of Chapter 2 and just kept the rest. And it was good. And somehow, against all reason, against all odds, fueled by a magnificent, exhausting burst of creativity from my success with Chapter 2, in a whoosh of inspiration, I splashed across the page a brilliant beginning for a tale—probably the most brilliantist thing ever.

If only it had been the beginning to my novel. Hee hee, har har.

But seriously, it was a pretty good beginning. At the time I wrote: “It’s quite gratifying to produce something that I know I couldn’t have written a year ago, or even six months ago.” So, pretty good then, relatively speaking, of course.

Later, without quite so much obsession, I wrote chapters 3 and 4, which took longer than could be expected, but that’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect.

All in all, in the splendor of its wonderful design, its sheer masterful compromise, it’s a beginning that fulfills absolutely none of the requirements I set forward as critically, vitally, pivotally essential for my beginning. But you saw that one coming a mile away.

Next week: The chapters following the beginning are actually pretty hard, too