Karl Whitney:  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl: writing a first draft is never easy

The first draft doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s about preserving the flow of the text rather than getting everything right first time

It’s tempting, then, to think that the writer, when editing and reshaping their own work, should put on a different hat, one that’s somewhere between the critic and the editor.

Writing is mostly a matter of putting everything in its correct place; it attracts those who tinker and prevaricate. 

Perhaps the practice also stirs up such tendencies in people who, had they not become writers, would have gone about their business in the world with a clear head, untroubled by said urge to tinker and prevaricate.

Sometimes a writer needs to tune into an unselfconscious mode — act, for a little while at least, like their job description doesn’t include worrying about words. 

If I was to go back to old essays I wrote at school or university, I’m sure that I’d find basic mistakes that were the result of the brash overconfidence of the neophyte.

 There I was, just enjoying words and thinking I sounded better than I did.

There’s a lot to be said for that kind of confidence, especially in the early stages of a project. 

Ultimately, your writing will be judged by words on the page, not thoughts in your head, and in practical terms the former will often help untangle the latter.

Some writers refer to this, disgustingly if accurately, as a ‘vomit draft’: you spew everything you can onto the page then worry about mopping it up later. 

It doesn’t need to be perfect, so you don’t trip yourself up getting lost in the detail. It just needs to be done.

With an approach such as this you’ll inevitably end up spending more time in the editing than you did in the initial drafting, and you’ll most likely have to impose further structure retrospectively, even if you’ve used a plan to write it.

In some ways writing like this is a good idea — especially if you’ve been staring at a blank page for an hour and need something to toy with and expand. 

Can’t think of a word or what sentence might go in a certain place? Put something in square brackets and return to it when you can. 

It’s about preserving the flow of the text rather than getting everything right first time.

Few people see the raw first drafts we write then squirrel away in some corner of our computer hard drives. 

Sometimes even we don’t even look at them again. 

Further versions of the document may not resemble our first attempt, but that doesn’t matter. 

Key steps in the geography of writing

That first draft was a key step in sketching out what you might call the geography of the writing: what goes where, what sequence might I want to use, how might I begin and end.

The decisions made in the first, messy draft might well be quickly revised: this sentence doesn’t work here; the addition of a line of dialogue will punch up the effectiveness of the point I’m making here; the introduction drags on and should be edited down to its essence and only then expanded if necessary.

But at least, by spewing things onto the page, you’ve put yourself in a position to make those decisions. 

Now comes the part where you examine your work with a critical eye, by which I mean you’re looking at your own work coldly, asking yourself what works and what doesn’t and trying to improve it as you go.

It can be more difficult than one imagines to divide the writing process cleanly into drafting and editing. 

There’s a grey area between them that’s often experienced when you’re casually looking over what you’ve just written, a task that’s made perhaps too easy by word-processing software. 

You’ll revise a troublesome sentence several times, almost unconsciously, during the process of writing. 

It’ll happen so quickly that you might never know that what you were doing in that moment was asking your inner editor to intervene.

By the time you’ve finished a first draft — an essay or short story or chapter of a book — you’ll have pages of text that you’ve turned over in your mind during the writing, even if you might think that all you did was hurl words onto the page. 

Some parts of the draft will be better formed than others — you’ll have thought things over without fully realising it, you’ll have unconsciously edited on the fly. 

And yet other parts will be obviously unfinished and in need of adjustment, revision, and even rejection. 

That’s when you can truly give your inner critic permission to assess and suggest improvement.

The figures of the writer and the critic are often perceived to be at odds. 

I’ve heard people identify creative writing with freedom and perceive criticism as some sort of dull exercise in reducing the richness and complexity of a work of art, censorious even. 

A good critical eye

Yet good writers are often good critics, in that they’ve studied the form they practice closely and can therefore identify good work, bad work, and can cultivate an admiration for challenging work that pushes the boundaries. 

Even if writers never publish reviews of books written by others you can bet that they’re looking at them closely.

(Of course, they may review works written by their friends, and at those times the critical compass spins wildly and all bets are off.) 

It’s tempting, then, to think that the writer, when editing and reshaping their own work, should put on a different hat, one that’s somewhere between the critic and the editor. 

The vomit draft enables this because often you’ll have a look at it and think: who the hell did this and what can be retrieved from the mess? 

The out of body experience of getting words on the page has enabled you to return to the work with the perspective of someone who investigates seriously gruesome crime scenes.

Of course, it’s never truly that bad. You’ve most likely been shrewd enough to lay down clues for your future self — the one who reopens the file and stares in horror — to follow up on. 

The different stages of writing — the plans and drafts and edits — are, really, a series of attempts to walk chaos in the direction of order. 

It’s just that your initial attempt could be a bit too close to chaos for comfort.

The truth is that no matter how polished a first draft might be, it will still need work. 

And if it’s too polished you might need to inject some life into it — break it apart and reassemble it with new additions so that it has more energy. 

You want ups and downs and the kinds of sentences that crackle — but too many beautiful sentences can send the reader asleep too.

I recently read a piece of wonderfully composed prose that the author probably believed resembled poetry — but the language distracted from the subject, and I felt that the piece would have worked better with a less highfalutin’ style. 

I’m showing my prejudices here, but I find that nature writing particularly suffers from this affliction. 

It’s often said that all writing is rewriting. Obviously, that’s not possible if there’s nothing on the page in the first place.

 What you’re looking for, as a writer, is a nice balance between spontaneity and formality, and that is best achieved by unleashing your inner critic once you have something to work with.

Learning how to make a mess and then clean it up are essential parts of the writer’s toolkit. 

Writing throws up many problems, and, at a certain point in the process — sometimes quite early — solving them becomes central to the writer’s success.

BOOKS & MORE

Check out our Books Hub where you will find the latest news, reviews, features, opinions and analysis on all things books from the Irish Examiner's team of specialist writers, columnists and contributors.