I’ve been at Nanowrimo for one week now. I’m loving it much more than I thought I would.

Here’s a link to my NaNoWriMo challenge: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/nolancapps

I will tell you a secret. I love writing rough drafts. I love adding a drop to the bucket every day and watching the bucket slowly fill up. It’s affirming. And I haven’t had the chance to write a first draft of a novel for a few years, because I’ve been revising and rewriting Mosquito Wings in that time. Diving into a first draft of Minesweeper Diaries is so freaking exciting.

Spewing out words is fun. I like the freedom of writing something that no one else will ever see. If you hate drafting, or if you’re struggling with a novel, or afraid of starting a novel because you think you may give up, I will offer you the principles that I follow when I draft. They may not work for you, but I encourage you to give them a shot.

Always, always, always move forward. I know so many people—and this isn’t to throw shade on y’all—but I know so many people who will write 20 pages of a novel, then go back to the beginning and tinker with the beginning. They keep changing the beginning, or they worry about getting the beginning perfect.

Again, if I don’t mean to call anybody out here. If this style of writing works for you, then keep on doing what works. I’ve just seen MANY novels die because an author couldn’t stop messing with the beginning. My philosophy is, don’t revise ANYTHING until I’ve written the manuscript all the way through and put it aside for a rest period.

My good friend Josh Galarza, author of The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (coming out in 2024) has a different approach. He will write in the morning, then read what he has written at night and make notes on it. The next morning, he will make edits on the new material, then keep writing new stuff. At night, read over the new stuff, and so on.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, and clearly it’s working for Josh, as he’s written several novels. The key thing is to figure out a routine that works for you and stick to it. But when I draft, I don’t reread or edit what I’ve written. I might read the paragraph where I stopped the day before so that I can orient myself, but then I keep going forward. No editing, no revision, just steady accumulation of pages.

DO NOT search for the perfect phrase. If I’m writing a description, and I’m not sure of the perfect verb for an action that a character is doing, I will just put down the first thing that comes to mind. If I write that “Roman stumbled down the ridge,” and then I think, wait, is stumbling the best verb? I will shake my head and say, doesn’t matter. For now, he stumbles. We have to move on.

You can sink a lot of time searching for the perfect metaphor, the perfect verb for a character’s action, or the perfect response in a line of dialogue. Don’t be precious, slap something down, and know that you will spend hours revising later. There will be time to find that perfect phrase or perfect description, but the time is not now.

Think of it this way. What if you labor for hours over a 300-word scene between two characters. You agonize to make their dialogue realistic and the choreography of the scene both natural and beautiful. Then, when you finish your first draft, you realize that the conversation between these characters is totally unnecessary, or impedes the pacing, or is tonally off, or it’s not true to their relationship, or is idk just plain wrong. Now you know you ought to cut it, but you don’t want to cut it because the writing is so good—and because you sank a whole Saturday into a 300-word scene.

Don’t fall into this trap. Don’t agonize over scenes or passages that may not even make the final cut of your novel. Don’t ice a cake that might be inedible. Don’t paint a mural on a wall you may tear down. And remember: no one, not even your grandmother, is going to read your first draft anyway.

Don’t stop to do research. See points 1 and 2. Don’t be a perfectionist or worry about factual accuracy. You should do research before you start drafting, but if you don’t (and I often don’t) you should do it after you’ve written a first draft. Or, at the very least, during some time when you’re not in the middle of a writing session. Your writing time is your writing time. DON’T USE IT TO DO RESEARCH.

If I have to describe a landscape that I haven’t seen, or the way some machine works, or a courtroom proceeding, or anything else I may not know, I won’t even slow down when I’m drafting. I’ll use brackets like so:

[description of the town and surrounding landscape]

[the trial starts]

[catalogue of animals in the Bronx Zoo]

And then I move on. I can fill out this empty places in the manuscript once the rest of the manuscript is done. This keeps me from slowing down as I draft. The first draft is a sketch, and from the sketch, you’ll develop the accurate portrait. Don’t strain for accuracy or completeness while you’re drafting. If you don’t know something, use brackets and move on.

Don’t beat yourself up. I prefer time goals over word count goals. The time goal at least lets me know when I’m going to be able to get up from my writing session. I use timers. A 15 minute timer to read for voice, then an 1:15 timer for my writing. I often get up before my timer is expired. I might say, I got five hundred words. That’s good enough for right now.

And then I’ll get up and do something else. Some days, I only write a single sentence. I tell myself, if I wrote even a single word in my MS today, I win. Beating yourself up about not writing enough brings negativity into the practice and makes it harder to sit down. Reward yourself frequently, and celebrate what you accomplish, not what you fail to accomplish. Just move forward, even if only a sentence at a time.

Rush the ending. When you feel, at last, that you are near the end of your story, don’t stress about the perfect ending. Rush the ending. Make it as sloppy and sketchy as possible so you can reward yourself for finishing the manuscript. When you revise, you can flesh out and fix the ending first thing, when you’re fresh and fired up.

Now, if you’ve been plodding through your writing routine for months, you’re probably not fresh. You probably hate the story. Maybe you’re only chipping away toward the ending, and you know that you’re so close, but it seems as though it gets farther away from you each time you sit down. Just slap something down, anything, whether it ties up the loose ends or not. You ought to spend at least twice as much time revising as you spent drafting (and probably much more) so don’t worry about getting the ending right on your first pass through. Again, no one is going to read this.

More than any other part of your first draft, rush the ending, and give yourself an extra reward for finishing. Once you’ve written a manuscript from beginning to end, it’s much, much harder to quit on it. Writing “The End,” on your first draft is like reaching a check point, or a ledge halfway up the cliff. Even if you fall in your revisions, you cannot fall farther than this ledge. You’ve written a whole book-length draft. And when you finish….

Don’t start revising immediately. Put the draft away. Don’t look at it. Write a few short stories or poems. Work on something completely unrelated. After six weeks (give or take) change the font of your manuscript, print it, and read it from start to finish with a red pen in your hand. I pretend the manuscript isn’t mine. I make a list of things that need to be fixed, parts that need to be rewritten, places where I’m bored, places where I’m so engaged I forget I’m reading, stuff like that.

But we’re starting to get into the territory of rewriting and revision now. That must mean this post is over. Wishing happy and healthy writing to you all.