A long time ago, October 20, 2017 to be exact, I posted the very first installment of “Twenty of Two – The Infamous They.” It was the beginning of my first draft. I began the first draft of “Dream Recorder” on February 17, 2019. Both would be posted here as they rolled off my fingers until I had heard enough from the characters to turn them into novels.
You saw all of their warts and deformities. All of my bad grammar and typos. I didn’t even bother to proof read. With a first draft, getting the story down is far more important that getting it write. You have to get to the end before you know how the beginning needs to be fixed.
Writer’s Block
Like many of you, I don’t suffer from that mythical condition called “writer’s block,” my characters just go silent and life simply gets in the way. Often it isn’t even “life” which gets in the way. Too often I just want to vegetate in front of a solitaire game. I also like working my way through boxed sets of DVDs with some Chardonnay at bed time.
If you watch the right DVDs and watch them well, you can even get some fantastic information from your own work. The lead character in “Twenty of Two” had long ago told me he would be poisoned in a way which threw off many false leads before the end of the story. The other characters would have to continue speaking with me to complete the story.
I hadn’t written that part yet because I didn’t feel like doing that much research about poisons on the Internet all at once. When you are writing about assassins, terrorists and that ilk, your Web searches, especially if you use Google, can get you in a lot of trouble. Someone with five+ books in that genre might get away with it when authorities come knocking, but if it is your first book when that happens you are going to need good, expensive lawyers.
Research isn’t Google
So, someone had the entire “Person of Interest” series on eBay pretty cheap. I honestly thought I had seen quite a few episodes of that show but I’m one DVD from the end of the third season and have only recognized three episodes. I’ve got to say this show had some fine writing and decent acting. The episode titled In Extremis actually gave me the one thing I needed to really continue on with the story. Polonium. A radioactive substance which is only fatal when ingested if it isn’t treated within the first 24 hours. You are dead in roughly another 48 hours otherwise. It’s also something most people have never heard of despite that Wikipedia page.
Tools and the first draft
Due to another post I might eventually write on my geek blog, I believed something was corrupted in the document and all of the copies I had of it. I could still open it and do things to it, but it always seemed to have that issue. It was time for a full read through anyway, so I opened the document in LibreOffice read-only and began typing as I read in OnlyOffice. (Yeah, OnlyOffice has quite a ways to go before it could hope to be a primary word processor. I almost installed Wine so I could install Lotus SmartSuite.)
Why I’m writing this post now is I can’t believe just how shitty that first draft was. Broken sentences, grammar errors, on and on. I’m surprised so many of you read the stuff, but you did, the site stats say you did. I managed to get north of 300 formatted pages into that work writing like a twelve year old, not caring about the initial quality because none of you were paying for it. When I get done with the re-typing, fixing, adding and completing this will weigh in north of 600 formatted pages.
Had I not chose to serve you the drivel, this novel would never have happened.
If you want to be a writer, just write
Far too many of you worry about crafting each sentence perfectly before going on to the next. Forget about it. Most of them will be shredded anyway when you finally have that flash of genius and the story takes a completely different direction. Your characters lie to you until they fully trust you. They don’t trust anyone who is anal about grammar, word choice and sentence structure. That’s for the editing process once you know your story is an actual story.
A lot of writers will never publish a book, claiming they have writer’s block when no such condition exists. You focused on minutia, pissed off your characters and they stopped talking to you. It isn’t a block when all of your friends leave the party, it’s just you sitting there alone because you weren’t a good friend.
Be a good friend. Listen to your characters. Type what they say as fast as you can. Wait to fix it until it is done. Sometimes you need to write multiple books at the same time just to complete one of them. You aren’t writing any book until you have a first draft, partial or not.
