I “completed” the first draft of my work in progress, Ring of the Axe, just before my 40th birthday. I even threw myself a theme party to celebrate.

Of course I knew the work wasn’t done there. Honestly, the last couple chapters were basically just a bulleted list of vague plot points and general vibes.

David, Jacques-Louis. *Madame Francois Buron* (1769). Art Institute Chicago. CC0 Public Domain Designation.

But I knew I had to cut myself off somewhere. I was spinning my wheels there at the end. If I didn’t stop and reset, I was going to get bogged down forever. So I called it “done” and set it aside for a few weeks. That was wise.

Then gave myself 1 week to re-read it before I would start revising a second draft.

That was foolish.

It took much longer than that. 3 months longer.

Reading that first draft…it was…it was a journey. A slog. A thrill. A roller coaster. A relief. I went through so many distinct moods and stages that I was reminded of the classic stages of grief. Like those famous stages, the 7 Stages of Reading Your First Draft are very personal and not at all linear. There were some days I went through all of these feelings within the span of a single page.

Stage 1: Surrealism

In this stage, you realize that reading a first draft is a complete out of body experience.

Sure, your name is on every page. The file is saved on your computer.

But…is it possible that you didn’t write it at all? Because most of it seems entirely new. Not just unfamiliar: new. Characters show up that you don’t remember inventing. Dialogue makes you cringe with fresh embarrassment. Some of the action has you turning pages anxious to find out what happens next. Why don’t you know what happens next?! Of all people, you should know!

On the other hand…if you were trained in the art of “shitty first drafts” like I was (thanks Anne Lamott), you haven’t gone back to read any of this. You just put your head down and wrote it.

For ROTA, it had been almost a year since I started writing the thing. A year for me to forget and then come back to it fresh. I also have a goldfish memory, so the first stage of reading was just reorienting myself to the idea that I wrote this.

Stage 2: Exposure

After you experience the first stage, you must come to terms with the fact that, yes, this is actually your work. You are responsible for it.

And oof, does that feel vulnerable. Have you ever tried to watch yourself back on video while giving a speech? Listen to your voice while you’re singing a new song?

Nothing makes me want to curl up into a ball and die more. It’s total exposure. Everything laid out there for anyone to see.

Sure, writing ROTA was hard. It took a lot of sweat and time and consistently showing up. But never before had I felt so emotionally naked as when I tried to go back and read it, exposing myself to every judgmental instinct in my body (and I have many of them). It was much harder to face it again and see how it measured up. To see how I measured up.

I was exposing myself to the yawning gap between what I wanted ROTA to be and what it actually was: a shitty first draft.

Stage 3: Judgment / Repulsion / Exasperation / Loathing / Annoyance / Disgust

In this next stage, you realize just how shitty it really is.

This stage actually defies to be named with one word because there are so many bad flavors your work will leave in your mouth. The characters will be two dimensional, or inconsistent. There will be rampant consistency errors. You won’t be sure whether you put any thought at all into the setting. And the grammar and punctuation…don’t even get me started.

You’ll start to question whether you have any talent whatsoever. You think about just packing it in so that you don’t have to wade through this trough of refuse that you’ve been magnanimously calling a first draft.

As I was reading ROTA, I could drown from impostor syndrome. World building? Designing magic systems? Developing plausible characters? Pretending that I knew what they would say and do? Making a compelling plot that actually went somewhere and paid off in the end?

I started to make a list of problems that just kept growing. I couldn’t believe how badly I’d done this.

Stage 4: Distraction

Knowing that your first draft is achingly far off from where it needs to be, filled with seemingly insurmountable problems, you will retreat into the Distraction stage.

This is a protection mechanism, guarding yourself against the pain of realizing that you are not as good as you thought you were. Not to mention the sheer overwhelm when you try to think of everything that needs to be done to make the draft better.

You can’t even look at the thing. You try to run and hide from it, ignore it. You spend way too much time organizing and planning your work than actually facing it and doing it (for example, by playing in a spreadsheet). You might hold the pages in your hand but be incapable of making your eyes focus on the words. You start to sleep in on mornings that you had promised yourself you would write.

You get more and more distant from the thing. You’re not just distant from this one draft: you’re becoming distant from your creativity. That distance makes you feel even shittier.

And that’s how I spent 3 months (not) reading my first draft. Sure, there were some life circumstances that would have set me back regardless, and my goal of 1 week was always ludicrous. But mostly I spent those 3 months huddled up, terrified of what I would find if I actually read my book.

Stage 5: Hope

But once you push past that fear…if you can just start…if you can just keep going…if you can let the editor in your brain make her little notes while you read on for the bigger perspective…

You might find that it’s not all bad.

Some of it is…actually, maybe, sort of…really good?

That little quip of dialogue will make you laugh. The way MMC leans in will make you swoon. The outfit that you described will make you want to cosplay. The action will make you keep turning pages to see what happens next. You’ll have a question, and then that question gets answered on the next page.

Don’t get me wrong, all the crappy stuff is still in there. And there is so much work to do. But you start to wonder again if there’s something there worth working on. You have hope.

Stage 6: Confidence

And you know what? Spotting the problems…it starts to feel reassuring, rather than self-loathing.

Think about it. At the end of the day, if you are irked, if you are tickled, if you are unsatisfied, if you are thrilled…then at minimum you have a sense of TASTE and STYLE. You have a VOICE. And it is uniquely your own, just like this book will be uniquely your own.

If you can spot the problems, you can fix them. You might not have the skills you need to address it all yet (maybe you never will), but you will learn by doing. You’ve learned so much already.

I’ve learned that I have a surprisingly strong sense of style. Before this process, I was not confident in my own writing voice. But then I had such visceral reactions to parts of my writing, both good and bad. I burble with excitement thinking about how I will get back in there and revise.

I’m confident that my sense of style will guide forward.

Stage 7: Inspiration

Thus encouraged by your growing confidence in your sense of style, you can move into the Inspiration stage.

You know what to focus on. And when you can trust those instincts, your mind starts to absolutely overflow with ideas.

You start to ask yourself questions…How can I make this character more plausible? What would make this section more engaging? How can I add variety to these scenes?

And the answers just appear. As if from divine inspiration. You’re sitting on the couch watching cartoons with your toddler and all of a sudden you have the solution.

Without giving too much away, I was wondering to myself one morning, “how can I pay off this plot point from earlier in the story?” Later that day I was bothered by a different thought: “how can I solve that inconsistency in the magic system?” And then I go and have a snack and go for a walk and totally spontaneously…a single answer appears to me and solves both problems with the juiciest, most SQUEE idea that literally makes me want to run to my keyboard.

That’s Inspiration.

What is a first draft, really?

As a writer, it’s always helpful for me to think about my first drafts in terms of other artistic media. A first draft is a sketch or a few slops of paint on the canvas to let you know where the green grass and the blue sky will go. It’s the thump of clay onto a potting wheel that’s just starting to spin. It’s spreading out all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and turning them face up.

The paints have been mixed, the clay has been prepped, you at least found all the edge pieces of the puzzle. The raw materials are ready here. Now it’s up to you to do the work of shaping them.

A first draft is never going to be good enough, not when your ambitions are high enough. Not when you’re trying to do something challenging.

Do any of these stages feel familiar to you? Have you experienced them with other creative endeavors beyond writing? How do you let yourself ride the wave of the challenging stages to get to the other side?

Ring of the Axe: Second Draft Underway!

Since writing this post, I met my March 1 goals to finish reading my first draft!!! HOORAY! Freed of that task (which was truly so hard for me), I have also…

Put more structure into the end of the book.
Spent time world building aspects that I need to be consistent: magic systems, governments, language and culture, history.
Reverse outlined the whole book (traditionally you outline before you write, which I sort of did, but going back to re-outline the story was extremely helpful for me to see the structure there).
Added some exciting sub-plots and reorganized some existing sections to support the book better.

And now I’m working on translating the new outline & ideas into the manuscript itself. It’s broad strokes for now, then I’ll go back in and make it all actually sound like a novel rather than a checklist.

Since word count isn’t really relevant any more, I’m tracking hours spent on this draft. So far I’ve spent 11.8 hours on my second draft! And I’ve worked on it at least a little bit EVERY DAY for the past 13 days! That’s definitely some sort of record for me.