This is a slightly updated version of a piece I originally wrote in February 2017.
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You're part way through your first draft and you've (reluctantly) realised that something major needs to change.
You need to lose a character. You need to gain a character. You were completely wrong about your antagonist's motivation. You had no idea what your protagonist was really hiding. You've started in entirely the wrong place. You've taken far too long to get the story going. You've skated over something vital. Your characters have embarked on an ill-advised relationship that you need to ditch, stat.
My first drafts always look something like this.
And however much I'd love to get it right, with a clear plan right at the start that I follow step by step, I've come to accept that novels simply don't work like that.
And that's okay.
You'll Discover Your Story as You're Writing
While I'm a fan of well-structured stories, and I love K.M. Weiland's excellent book Structuring Your Novel, it's pretty much impossible to sit down and plan an entire novel ... then stick to your plan.
You simply don't know, at the start, what's going to work out. Some chapters may end up being much longer (or shorter) than you intended; incidents that seemed significant in the story plan might end up being overshadowed by something that emerges as you write chapter five.
I don't think this means you shouldn't plan. I think it's well worth having some clear ideas about:
- Where your story starts: what kicks it all off (this is often called the "inciting incident")
- Why your protagonist gets involved (the "call to action")
- What big events are going to happen along the way (e.g. the "midpoint" – a turning point half-way through your story)
- How it's all going to end
As you go through, I'd suggest planning ahead (otherwise you'll end up writing meandering scenes that don't really go anywhere – believe me, I've been there!) – but see your plan as a living, changing document rather than something set in stone.
If, like me, you find that you uncover something crucial about your story a third of the way into your novel, don't go back and rewrite immediately. Just make a note about what you're going to change in the second draft, and keep going forward as though you've already neatly excised that character / rewritten that bit of backstory / started off quite differently.
You Won't Get Everything Right First Time Round
Writing a novel is, I feel, far harder than writing a non-fiction book.
With most non-fiction, you're simply trying to give information in a clear and engaging way: not a trivial task, by any means, but one that can be approached in a fairly step-by-step fashion.
With a novel, you've got a huge amount to get right: you need your characters to grow and develop in a satisfying way, you need to pace your story so that the tension keeps rising towards the climax, you need to make sure your plot hangs together but that twists aren't completely predictable ... and along with all that big-picture stuff, you also need to write engaging descriptions and realistic-yet-significant dialogue
...
... you simply can't get everything right the first time round, and that's what redrafting is for.
So, be kind to yourself. Accept that your first draft is going to be, in parts, a bit of a mess. (It'll also have its flashes of brilliance and, quite probably, a fair number of passages you don't remember writing at all.)
Like all authors, you'll find that you have to cut out large sections of hard work: this is painful, but vital. And as you redraft, and redraft again, you'll gradually shape your novel into what it was supposed to be all along.
