On ten top tips for getting through a first draft of writing
It's painful, it's messy, it mght even make you cry, but somehow you have to extract that first draft from inside your soul. This is what I've learned to help you do that.
Each time we all open a new document on Substack, we’re greeted with two little words
Start writing…..
They look so welcoming and so calming, and their lighter grey colour means they look gentle. Just start writing, they purr. It’s easy.
I have been thinking about that little command - Start writing… - as I embark on a first draft of a big new piece of new work. At this stage, I don’t like to call it a “book.” If I screw my eyes up and squint into the far, far distance, I am pretty certain this draft will become a book. But at this early stage, it’s important to create the right conditions for my creativity to feel that the floor is, if not solid, then definitely just firm enough to tentatively start walking across.
This is the fifth time I’ve put myself through this ordeal started a new book big writing project and so I know what this feels like. It’s familiar. The pain of it, which is largely manifested in a profound sense of self doubt and a very, very intense desire to procrastinate, isn’t new. It’s a familiar place to be. But it shocked me a lot, during the autumn of of 2022, when I was in the early stages of writing The Giant on the Skyline, as a serious sense of first draft fear and self-loathing hit me harder than I can at least remember from any of my previous books.
This surprised me - I was on book no 4, shouldn’t this process be getting easier? I knew exactly what I wanted the book to be about, which was a deep, layered exploration of what home means. I knew I wanted to delve into the idea of home as a place, certainly, but also explore the way home might be embodied by other, less tangible concepts, like an emotion, a person, ghosts from the past, a sense memory. And I knew I wanted the writing to glimmer with the bright green wonder of a field in southern England on a wet spring morning; I wanted it to feel mystical and magical and be threaded through with the voices of many other people, beyond my own, who would help the writing communicate what home felt like. I wanted it to have giants and jewels and chalk and in it, and to smell like blackberries and woodsmoke. Sounds easy? Not at all.
I had a strong vision of what I wanted. But the reality of putting those feelings on to the page was much harder than imagining them in my head. I spent a month, that autumn, sitting at my desk, wailing, wringing my hands and even crying. I wrote sentences, and sometimes whole paragraphs, then deleted them. I stood up and walked around the room, pulling at my hair and hating myself. Nothing I wrote came out as I wanted it to. I rang up my agent, and told him I wanted to return my advance and do something useful for a career, like become a physiotherapist. Shhhh, he soothed me. Just keep going. Think of yourself as a minstrel, walking through that landscape you love, gathering images of the places that speak to you.
It worked. Ridiculous though it sounds, think of yourself as a minstrel became something I said to myself in my head when first draft terror paralysed me. Just keep walking. See what you find. Play your little lute and enjoy the walk. Start writing…
So I know very well what first draft fear feels like it. But there are certain things I’ve learnt to do throughout this difficult process to sooth myself or galvanise myself or motivate myself, to keep going.
So if you are at first draft stage, here are my practical suggestions about how to start writing…