Trial and Error.

When I was in art class at school, I remember hating my work. I would rub out my drawings, or at least parts of them, at regular intervals, until a teacher discouraged me from doing that. The teacher said that things never look right when they're only partially complete, and you have to keep adding and changing things to make the drawing look as it's supposed to. Instead of rubbing it out or screwing it up into a ball and throwing it in the bin, I was taught to work with what I had; alter bits, add things, maybe just erase a tiny bit of a line to change its placement on the page, but never discard the whole thing.

I was having a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine, who is writing a novel. We were talking about self-doubt and how much of an obstacle it can be to getting our work done. It's for this reason that the book I'm editing now is the only one of my novel attempts to have made it to the completion of its first draft. All other attempts have been abandoned with the conviction that they were no good.

My friend was running the concept for her novel past me, asking for my opinion on whether it could work and whether her ideas were any good. Of course, they were. She has a wonderful imagination, a real knack for world-building and the linguistic skills to tell a story properly. But, as most of us do, she goes through times when she is unsure of her own abilities. This is where our discussions are helpful. We can give each other the kick up the arse and reassurance we each need to get those ideas down on the page.

Sometimes, we look at things all wrong. We expect things to be perfect right from the beginning; for our work to come into fruition without a single flaw or setback. We know it doesn't really work like that, though. Every creative piece of work has a lot of trial and error. For those of us who have very limited time at our disposal, we tend to want to get everything right quickly. It's gutting when we spend ages on a chapter only to realise it doesn't work and end up cutting most of it. It does feel like a huge waste of time.

It's not, though.

Every mistake is not only a learning opportunity but a pathway to "getting it right." When we go down a certain path in our story and it doesn't work, we then know why it doesn't work and we change our direction, finding a way that suits our story better. There may be things about our plot and characters that we learn on that misguided journey, which can be stored up in our minds and saved for later. We almost always come out of the bits we got "wrong" with more inspiration than we had before, so how can we possibly consider this a waste of time?

What I've realised is the point of first drafts isn't to get them right but to get them written. We can't be expected to fine-tune every element of the piece until it's finished and we've seen where our imaginations have taken us. That's what the editing process is for. And, as we go along, we might have new ideas which mean backtracking a bit and adding or changing bits that we've already done to fit the new aspects of our plot. It's really exciting to see how our stories take shape and evolve as we write them, isn't it? That's the part I find the most fun.

Whatever you write as you do your first draft, it's all a step in the right direction; it all drives you closer to the finished product, whether you keep it all or lose some of it. When the page is blank because you've deleted everything you've done for the tenth time in a row, there is nothing to adapt, nothing to transform into something better, nothing there for you to work with at all. When you have some words in front of you, the possibilities are endless. Those words can become whatever you want them to become. They are the start of something beautiful. They might be the start of something that looks entirely different by the time you've finished with them, just like those drawings of mine in high school.

For all of you out there writing first drafts, happy writing! Have fun with it.

V.