The Rough Draft

So eventually you'll realize that the book you just wrote has only one purpose; you glue the pages together with peanut butter and you feed it to your cat. You sit back in your chair with a sadistic smile and raise your lukewarm coffee to your lips...and the cat just gives you a look because it's not even worth eating.

Well, great, you have to do something with it. So you pick it up and peel open the pages. You hesitate to scrape the gunk out of it because it actually looks better covered in peanut butter. But you clean it up and flip through it just in case it magically became better than the piece of trash that it was a minute ago.

Unfortunately it still looks like someone keyboard-smashed 95k words' worth of gobbledygoop.

That's called a rough draft.

It's full of run-on sentences and comma splices. There are some paragraphs that you can't decipher because you tried to write some dialogue in a language you can't actually speak and Google Translate is like 'nah, man, your guess is as good as mine.'

Some of the sentences are missing entire words because you were thinking faster than your pen could keep up. Halfway through you decided to change your main character's name but you keep forgetting so now all you can think as you read is 'I thought this book was about Peter. Who's this Mark guy and why does he keep showing up in random places?'

Not to mention you keep accidentally bouncing back and forth between first person and third person and you forget the second half of your quotation marks on three-fourths of your dialogue.

In a word, your manuscript is a nightmare. It's a natural disaster and all you want to do is drop it in the fire and bask in the warmth of your failure.

Everybody's rough draft looks like that. It's okay. When you have a book idea and you're stumbling over the perfect first sentence (and it has to be perfect right? Everyone says it has to be perfect - no pressure), stop. Your first sentence should be the very last thing you write.

Odds are, you won't think of the perfect opener until you've edited your book seven times, so for now you can definitely slap a 'once upon a time' on your page and move on.

And just write. Forget editing, Grammarly will deal with that later. You don't have to spell things right - let your fingers trip over the keys. Those squiggly red lines under every tenth words are just decoration.

Use the shotgun method and chase every plot you can think of. Create too many characters if you must. You can merge one or two of the redundant ones later. Can't think of a good name for your bad guy? Refer to him as Captain Ugly Face and move on.

Don't let things trip you up. Power through the writer's block. It'll be boring and weird and someone will invariably die a really strange death in the process, but that's allowed.

In fact, you should probably make your rough draft as ridiculous as possible so you laugh over it when you read it later.

It's better than crying.

Aw, who am I kidding? You'll cry anyway.

"I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." - Shannon Hale

Your book idea is always grand when it is first born. It pops into your head at the most inopportune time and all you can do is stop mid-stride and drop your handful of Cheetos because it's the greatest idea you've ever had.

Your eyes go wide and a star-struck gasp escapes from your mouth. You grab for your phone and start typing out incoherent sentences that more or less encapsulate your great idea, and you're all the while smiling to the point that your mom thinks you're texting your crush but it's just so beautiful.

And yeah, you know that after about two weeks of pounding away at your keyboard, you'll have milked your idea dry and you'll realize how stupid it is. (Because, oh, wait, everyone has a soulmate AU)

But you have to keep writing, because your idea wasn't stupid. It was beautiful, remember? And it came from you. You had something to offer - don't give up on it.

Granted, your great idea would ideally take place in the sixth book and the thought of getting there is daunting, but you have to try.

"Rewriting isn't just about dialogue. It's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene." - Tom Stoppard

When you finish your manuscript, you'll most likely hate most of it. But it started out as a beautiful idea and you've shaped it into a pale, lifeless, smelly thing that kind of looks like a story.

If you've made it this far, then you can keep working until you bring it to life.

"If I waited for perfection I would never write a word." - Margaret Atwood