The First Draft Was Fun. Successive Drafts—SO MUCH Less Fun.

Before I started writing the memoir, I had been working and reworking a poetry manuscript and having little luck with publication. Everything about my writing at the time felt stuck.

Writing the first draft of the memoir was so liberating, so enjoyable, that I wondered why I hadn’t been writing more prose all along.  Certainly when you are in the first draft of anything—just jazzing around—it’s a party! But here, the words were tumbling forth at a velocity I had never summoned in writing poetry, even in my first drafts. Images of rivers kept popping up in the draft because that’s how the writing felt—rushing current. I guess they don’t call it being in “flow” for nothing.

Look how easy this is! I said to myself as fifty thousand words seemed to write themselves.

When I got to about 80,000 words, I had the bulk of a draft, and it was time to try to make sense of it. Then I read it. It was, of course, a formless muck—fragments of description and dialogue where I thought I had scenes, characters that never get developed or even recur, stylistic disparity, structural inconsistency—Anne Lamott’s proverbial shitty first draft. 

Somehow, though, I hadn’t expected it. As I was writing, I knew I would have to make changes to draft one—probably minor ones. I thought it would take me a month or two, tops, to get the draft into shape and send it to readers for feedback. Ha! And this despite knowing better, having been a smug creative writing teacher for many years—did I think the horrible first draft and excruciating, interminable second draft I had read so much about were for other people, not me?

It took me about eight months to make progress on the second draft.

The quotient of fun, early draft writing to not fun, later draft writing seems directly proportional.  Successive drafts of the prose have felt even harder and more cruel, more intimidating and just more abjectly miserable than successive poem drafts or even poem collection drafts. Maybe this is because I am still on a steep learning curve, and maybe this is what it was like when I began writing poetry and I have just forgotten about it. Maybe this is because, with so much more material, there is so much more to figure out about what needs keeping and what needs tossing and what, with a little work, might be keepable, and what parts from the beginning even seem to be in the same book as what parts from the end. I began to understand why some novelists say they write a first draft, learn what they need to about the story, and then toss it completely to begin the second draft from scratch.

But also, with poems, revision is more manageable because I can see the whole poem at once. I can even lay poems out on the floor and see a whole manuscript at once. And this gives a more simultaneous sense of my goals for the piece and somehow keeps my anxiety in check, making the job of revision feel less insurmountable.

Looking back, I wish I had encountered the following advice: Your first draft will probably flow effortlessly—but write it with the idea—maybe even the intention—of scrapping the whole thing, even if that’s not what you end up doing. Later on, choosing what you lose will be easier, and everything you get to keep will seem like a gift.