The Necessity and Purpose of a First Draft:

As I said earlier, when I started writing, I assumed that because I was a reasonably intelligent human being, I could write a novel in 1 draft.  If I focused hard, concentrated hard, I could write a novel, then maybe go through and do a little spell checking and grammatical corrections, and I'm done.  Most intelligent people think this.

This is not, nor has ever been the case for any writer.  It is not productive to assume that this can be done, and with only one exception has ever been successful.

To understand exactly what a first draft is, and why I can say with almost complete certainty that you will have many drafts, let us discuss the only human being in the history of any form of writing who did not right first drafts... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mozart wrote music... to be precise he wrote entire symphonies.  This is a tremendous amount like writing a novel.  Each character in your novel is nothing more than an instrument in a symphony.  They have ups and downs, a climax, a dénouement, entrances and exits, and function together to form one collective work.  Writing music is so astonishingly akin to writing a novel, that for many intents and purposes they can be considered to be the same thing.  Of every writer in human history, from Tolstoy to Shakespeare, from Bach to Beethoven, from Hemingway to Charles Dickens, all of them wrote drafts of every work they ever made which had any success whatsoever.  Most of them wrote numerous drafts.

The only known exception to this was Mozart.  He wrote entire symphonies, four hours long, from beginning to end, in one sitting.  Not one note was ever out of place, not one mistake ever made.  He is the only known human being to have done this successfully.  He had them all memorized in his head before he ever wrote them, and could write them forwards and backwards with equal ease. He is the only known human being not to have drafts.

If you believe you are of the caliber of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then you certainly do not need to write drafts.

If, on the other hand, you are only as skilled as Hemingway, Kipling, Dostoyevsky, or Herman Melville, you will need to write many drafts.  It is simply how writing is done.  There is purpose in it, and no writer in history (other than Mozart) has ever felt that it was not a vital component of writing.

Hemingway once said "all first drafts are shit!”  Regrettably, that is not entirely accurate.  However, if you understand what a first draft is supposed to do, and you are a skilled writer, then it will be shit.

I have encountered on large number of writers who asked me "how do you complete a novel?  I can't get past chapter 6".  People have this problem because they do not understand what a first draft is.  There are trying to write a novel for publication, which is why they cannot finish it. They all say "Oh, I know that this is only a draft", but secretly they hope to finish it, do a little error correction, and find it finished.

The first draft is for you and you alone.  I highly recommend you promised yourself you'll never allow anyone to read your first draft.  This will free you up to write whatever you want to write in any way you want to write it.

Human beings have two basic modes of thought: creativity and problem solving.  Certainly while you can be a creative problem solver, problem solving is actually a different part of thinking then creation.  It is very easy to slip from creative mode into problem solving mode.  However, switching back is extraordinarily difficult.  It takes a great deal of skill, and even those who are practiced at it cannot always do it on command.  If you go up to a comedian and ask them to tell you a joke, the chances are he will be unable to come up with anything funny. He simply is not in the proper mindset.

Most people (though not all, and certainly not necessarily) have a pretty good idea of what they want to say in their novel when they start it. However, the Mozart's of the world aside, people almost never have the entire story in their head when they start.  This is what the first draft is for.  The first draft is for you to put down everything you know, think, or suspect about your story.  Everything, including the kitchen sink, should be in your first draft.  It is far easier to remove extraneous things from a story than it is to add things later.  It doesn't matter if you know you might not keep a scene, if you have the fought for a scene in your head, put it in the draft.

You will undoubtedly encounter problems... you'll find that you are forcing certain characters to do things you don't want them to do.  Ignore these problems.  You are not in the problem solving stage.  You are in the creativity stage.  You are expelling all of your thoughts to paper, no matter how stupid, no matter how brilliant.  I cannot tell you how many times I have killed a character in chapter 2, only to realize I desperately needed him alive in chapter 8.  So what do I do?  I write him completely alive, as if he never died.  I don't explain it, I don't justify it... characters which saw him die in chapter 2 are not shocked to see him in chapter 8... I write it as if chapter 2 never happened. I don't go back and fix it either, because I still don't know what the problem is.  I know there is a problem; I've killed a character I need.  But there are one million ways to solve this problem, and as of yet I haven't finished the story.  How can I know the best way to solve the problem, if I don't know the entire story yet?

If you write your first draft correctly, the story will border on the insane.  You will have contradictions, scenes which defy the laws of physics, some characters which are two-dimensional, some characters which changed names halfway through the story, scenes which you don't need and which don't make sense...in short, you'll have chaos.

You will also start to have a very good idea of what it is you are really trying to say.  Now you can look at this draft and see what the big picture really is.  What in this draft do you think is important?  What did you leave out, that now maybe you think should be put in there?  What is in there, but maybe you do not need?  Where are your contradictions, and what might be some good ways of solving them now that you have an idea of where you're trying to go?

I will say it again, because it is extremely important... you should promise your self that you will not allow anyone to read your first draft, no matter how good you think it is.  It's not because they might think you're a bad writer... it's because when you know someone might read it, you will begin to censor your self, and the first draft is the last place where you should be censoring your self.  The first draft is about unmitigated creation.  Without that phase, you will be unable to truly write an excellent story.  The first draft is not about continuity, it is not about good storytelling, is not about impressing people (including yourself), it is not about answering questions or solving problems.  It is about writing every idea that you have pertaining to this story, and leading more ideas flow from the process of writing it.

Once you have completed a first draft, I suggest you take a break of at least several days... think about the story, but don't work on it.  What did you like about it?  What you do not like about it?  Did it really go in the direction you wanted to?  If no, why not?  These are the fundamental questions you need to answer.  If you really want to, you can think about the good old "what do I do about the fact I killed off a character that I need in the story?" problem, but even then, you're not really at that stage yet either.  This is the stage to think about the central theme of your story, where you want to go with it, and have you in some remote fashion accomplished that.

Once you've done that, it's time for your second draft.  If you are eager to show some of your work to people, you can show this (but tell them all this is your first draft).if you like the direction of the novel, and think you really know what it is you would like to say, then break up your first draft into smaller pieces (maybe into thirds or quarters, maybe into chapters, maybe even smaller).  Start your second draft, drawing from the first draft only when you want to.  There's no law saying that you have to adhere to any of the elements in your first draft.  Try not to have any major contradictions, and if you start to encounter them, consider simple ways of avoiding them.  If you honestly can't, then continue writing anyway, but a major goal should be to have a pretty cohesive story in the second draft.  The second draft should also really express what is your trying to express.  It may do it with a bulldozer, and certainly you may want to be much more subtle in your final draft, but for your second draft you need to be reasonably sure that you're saying what it is you want to be saying.

After this comes the third draft.  Usually the third draft is written a very similarly to the second, with most of the same scenes, usually in the same order.  Sometimes some things are shifted around a bit, but if you understood where you wanted to go in the second draft, the third draft should really be about cleaning it up and tweaking and getting it much more precise.  This draft is about subtlety, about craft, about making your sentences sound good, making them read well, making them float together nicely.

Some people like to consider the third drafted their final draft.  Certainly you can do that.  In truth, you should really do a fourth draft which is all about making it the best it can be.  I like the third draft to be really about smoothing out wrinkles, really defining the characters and the plot, and leave the fourth draft to telling the story as best I can, to the actual part of storytelling.

In truth, past the first draft, these are just guidelines.  Some people only do a first draft and a final draft.  I personally believe they are robbing themselves of excellent work... however others disagree, and certainly if you are more interested in quantity than quality, a two draft model will work very well for you.  Also, if you are telling nonfiction, you'll certainly have fewer drafts.  In nonfiction you won't have many of the plot and character concerns to work out -- it's all already been done for you... also the more you understand the story when you start writing, the less you may need drafts (although this is not always the case... if maybe that while you think you understand the story, you are actually limiting your self, and drafts will help open you up).

The only real piece of advice I can give regarding this is that most people consider their goal to be to write as few drafts as possible.  This is not the goal of a writer.  The goal of a writer is to tell the story as best he or she can.  To that end, you write as many drafts as is necessary.  There is no rule as to how many drafts you will need, save that you will at least need a first and a final draft.  All true writers have a first draft, and use it as an indispensable tool.  If you try not to take it too seriously, if you play with it, which is exactly what you should do, you will actually find it can be a tremendous amount of fun.