How a writer’s work isn’t done just because the first draft is.
The first draft. It’s an idealized thing. A dump of words on the page, we revel as the tally climbs up, and up, and up. We take the challenge in November or any time at all with daily goals. We think we’ve won when we upload the final count and print off the certificate.
That’s what I thought last year. I thought I won.
But I put my draft away and it became another nagging project. Another incomplete thing. Having a tangible, active goal was terrific, but once I crossed over my 50,000 word count, I was spent.
And if I was honest, I was floundering.
The plot had drifted, the characters weren’t behaving as I wanted them to behave. Some had floated away entirely, victims to my ill-defined plot and my inability to keep track of names and traits. My word count might have brought me a win, but it didn’t feel like a victory.
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It comes when words are cut and paragraphs rewritten. It comes when the writer realizes that the win isn’t in the 50,000 or the 100,000. There’s no victory in the first draft. That’s merely a start. The win is in the editing, the rewriting, the revising.
Talk to me three drafts in. Or six. Or sixteen — although at some point, the writer does need to let go. I’m on the third substantial draft of the memoir I wrote in 2015, and shelved after an awkward rewrite in 2016 left me floundering and uncertain.
The first draft was enough to cross the finish line of my MFA but the real victory here is every time I open the draft and recast another paragraph, rearrange another page, take out a comma and put another one back in.
That’s where the work is happening, and that’s where the story will be found.