Okay, so it's technically not writing advice. Or, at least, it wasn't intended to be.
A couple of years ago I was reading an oral history of Angels in America, Tony Kushner's epic (both in terms of scale and length) two-part play about the AIDS epidemic in the United States 1980s. It is widely considered one of the most important works of theater of the twentieth century, and the fact that it recently received a Broadway revival might be the only thing that could make me regret moving away from New York City.
The story of Kushner writing the script, which he delves into in that oral history, is fascinating. It is also, to put it bluntly, messy. What Kushner makes clear is that he had no idea what story he wanted to tell, or how he wanted to tell it, when he started writing. He would just sit down and write, letting the characters develop and finding new ideas to explore with every turn. At one point he went to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and over the course of ten days wrote 700 pages.
Of course, there is no way that all 700 pages would make their way into the final script, and Kushner knew that. "There was a lot of shit," he admitted. But he saws that what got him through those ten days and 700 pages, was by giving himself a simple message: "Nobody has to know what I've done here."
I have always been a perfectionist when it comes to writing, to an almost literal degree. If what I was writing wasn't perfect, I didn't want to put it down on the page. Having this perspective was, as you can imagine, exhausting and unproductive. The moment I felt a writing project didn't live up to my standards, I abandoned it, jumping to whatever new idea I had that I'm sure I could complete without ruining by writing anything imperfect. If you couldn't guess, I wouldn't end up finishing that new project either, and the cycle would continue.
But somehow, that is not the only way that this demand for perfection would negatively impact my writing. Because every once in a while I would actually finish a project I was working on. Or, at least, I would finish a first draft. And then I knew that I was supposed to edit my project to make it better. But here's the thing: when you only let yourself write when you think your writing is perfect, it makes it really hard to edit what you've written, because you think that what you've written is perfect! I would justify every idea, every sentence, every word, by telling myself that it must be what I mean to write, and therefore I shouldn't change it. If I changed it, I was essentially admitting failure. My inability to edit my work held me back as a writer more than anything else.
I have always written for myself, but I have also always written with the audience in mind. When I write I am thinking about what the reader or viewer or listener will be thinking and feeling, and how my writing will affect them. So when I read what Kushner told himself, "nobody has to know what I've done here," I found it incredibly freeing. I realized that the process of writing, particularly writing the first draft of a story, is just about getting my ideas down on paper in a moderately coherent fashion. It's not meant for general consumption.
Once those ideas have been written down, editing is about refining them. Restructuring, cutting out anything that doesn't make the story better or reinforce the main idea, and adding in what was missing in the first draft. Editing is about turning something that I wrote for me into something for other people, so that hopefully they can understand my ideas and feel the full effect of the story I am trying to tell. The first draft isn't even really a story yet; it becomes one in the editing process.
I am very close to finishing the first draft of my first novel, the most ambitious writing project I have undertaken besides my college thesis. When I started writing it all I had in my head was two characters and an ending. As I wrote I invented ways to develop the story, to find new conflicts and obstacles, and in the process I learned about the characters and the world they are inhabiting. About three-quarters of the way through the drafting process I realized that I would need to completely restructure most of the beginning of the story. Not only that, but the changes I planned to make would mean that everything I would write continuing the original narrative would also need to be rewritten. Essentially, if I kept writing, rather than starting over from the beginning, I would have to throw out almost everything that I wrote when I started editing.
I'm still writing it, though, for a few reasons. First, it's because this is my first novel, and I really want to finish it, just to say I have. Second, considering my aforementioned history of abandoning projects, I want to prove to myself that I can finish this one, otherwise I am afraid I will end up in an endless cycle of restarting it and never actually finishing it. It will be good for me, for both of those reasons, to have a completed rough draft, no matter how rough it is.
But also, I think it will be good for my story. Part of the process of writing this draft is to understand my characters as deeply as possible and to develop of the flow of the narrative. Putting these characters into different situations will help me with both of those. Even if I don't use anything that I wrote in my last few chapters, the work that I do will make future revisions easier and the end result better. All of the work matters, even if it doesn't show up in the final product.
I'll be finishing my first draft in the next few days, and starting my second draft pretty soon after that. I'm so excited about all of the new ideas I'll get to explore as I start rewriting. Who knows, a few of them might even show up in my final draft.
What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten, whether it was meant to be writing advice or not?
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