How I Wrote My (First) First Draft

And you can too! Probably!

Well, Ladies and Germs, I did it. I finally finished the first draft of an original, not fanfiction novel!

I wish I could tell you that it gushed out of me like a river of inspiration, that it was simple once I knew what I was doing.

But I’d be lying out of my butt and back through again.

I was, at times, madly inspired, consumed with my muse at the detriment of everything else, forgetting to wash the dishes and do chores…. “Forgetting.” (Sure, Nicole.) But it took years for everything to fit together, months and months of disciplined writing time nearly every day. I don’t know if my process will light a fire under your own writing journey, give you inspiration, or just make you want to flush your manuscript down the toilet, but now that the draft is a full, entire book that makes sense (but still needs lots of edits), I’d like to share my process.

The Beginning

I started drafting in 2021, in the middle of Covid, when everyone was finding ways to bide their time during what felt like the end of the world. I, along with many other people, thought what better time to actually sit down and write that novel I’ve always told myself I was going to write. I had a couple of story ideas floating around in the back of my head: a simple dialectic between an angel and the Devil debating the nature of free will, and another about an angel falling in love with a witch. Well, why not put the two together? And the seeming apocalypse that was happening all around us at that time felt like a perfect inspiration. It would be about an angel and a witch and demons and Armageddon at the end of the world. An epic urban contemporary fantasy for the times—and the America—I was living in.

And herein, I hit my first huge snag.

I am not an outlining kind of person. I never outlined in college. I wrote everything in big bursts of inspiration the night or so before an assignment was due. My short stories worked the same way. So because of that, I naturally assumed that I was a discovery writer. Throw caution to the wind! Write out whatever scene you think is cool and put it in! I know what a plot is supposed to look like, I watch lots of movies and read lots of books! Sort it out later!

Writing that way was… not good for me, to say the least. Yes, I got some cool ideas out there, but they weren’t going anywhere plot-wise or character-arc-wise. I thought they were, at the time. But what I was really doing was just figuring my characters out as I went, trying to understand who they were, how they would react to different situations and with each other. I actually wrote about this in a different article below.

I realized, for me, I needed to know all of this stuff beforehand. This was supposed to be pre-writing exercise.

It’s been said many times—what’s interesting to you is not necessarily interesting to the reader. Some part of me knew I was just wandering around, making my characters go on little side quests forever, and I got frustrated and bored. I got so frustrated, in fact, that I abandoned it for years.

Limbo

In those years of putting it on the backburner, I started two other manuscripts, which had the same problems as the first one. I was puttering around, overwriting, and not getting to the goddamned story. So with one of those manuscripts, I did do an outline, finally.

It was an absolute mess.

The general rule of thumb is that a given novel will have about 40-60 scenes in it, give or take. If you counted every large bullet point as a scene, my manuscript-in-progress was going to have about 80.

Woof.

Not only that, but I absolutely couldn’t figure out which scenes I didn’t need. I was tearing my hair out. It was then that I had a bit of a revelation. I had a really nice chat with

A Literal Writer’s Journey

about scene length and number and fitting them into a three (or sometimes 5) act structure. Sure, I’d read plenty of books, I knew about The Hero’s Journey, but I had never really studied the structure of a fiction book and counted out how many major scenes there were and how long they took to play out. So I did. Once I started paying attention to the plots of these books, I realized they could easily tell a story with half the scenes that I thought I needed for my book.

So why couldn’t I just… do that? Why was it so hard?

I realized I had a lot of darlings to kill. A LOT. It was going to be a straight-up massacre. I also realized I felt it was time to move that angel/witch/Armageddon story back up to the front burner.

(I haven’t yet killed all the darlings with the manuscript that was 80 scenes long… I will though, eventually, once I can stand to look at it again.)

Erasing is the hardest part

I actually started writing again in the middle, far beyond where I’d stopped originally. I never thought I would be okay with writing out of sequence. It always seemed so… illogical to me, somehow? Like, how are you supposed to know where to go if you don’t start at the beginning? Nevertheless, I felt the desperate need to begin at the midpoint twist, the bigass climax, and work from there. Now things were actually flowing and coming together, like the muse on amphetamines. When I was fleshing out that part, it also got me used to deleting huge swaths of story without a second thought. Anything that didn’t move the story was gone.

Once I got to the end, that’s when I knew I was ready to start again from the beginning.

I had to tighten my belt, get my shotgun, and take every single unnecessary character, scene, subplot, side quest, and plot point out behind the barn.

Of my original manuscript, only two scenes escaped relatively unscathed; the very beginning, and the angel’s dialectic with the Devil, which was part of the original exploration for the entire story. Nearly every other thing went out the window, except for a couple of half-baked scenes that I stuck back into the oven to finish cooking.

And then… I was doing it. I was actually writing a novel. Not scenes, not disconnected ideas, not writing exercises. This was my book, and it made sense. I could imagine someone else reading it and actually getting it. Maybe even drawing fanart.

What the future holds

When I finally stitched the parts together, though, I felt a little sad. I’d been writing and rewriting this thing for months and months, getting down at least 500 words a day religiously. When I was done, I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself. (Write this, I guess.) I still have to trim quite a bit out of it to get down to 120k, which is apparently the absolute limit for debut fantasy novels (even though I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy novel under 130k.) That’s only if I want an agent and want to get traditionally published (I do!). I’m sure it’s going to be another whole bucket of worms to sift through.

I think it’s a little useless to read article after article about writer’s block, and I’m sorry I can’t tell you how to defeat it and deliver on the promise I made in the title. At this point, I think writer’s block might be essential to the writing process. You need to stop and think, sometimes for years. If you’re reading this article because you’re stuck, perhaps you’re not actually stuck, you just can’t pinpoint the ideas about writing that you need to abandon. I thought I was a discovery writer who could write a whole book all the way through beginning to end, and I was not. Every person’s writer’s block is different, too. Maybe you have the opposite problem to me and your manuscript feels barren instead of overstuffed. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that problem. Maybe it’s overstuffed because your prose needs to be simpler, or less repetitive. Maybe you made a plot trap that your character just can’t get out of. I don’t know. All I can tell you is what happened with my novel and how I dealt with it, and to not give up!

And as this process goes on, I hope to share more milestones along the way and give you any tips I possibly can that might make it easier for your own publishing journey (if the publishing gods are kind to me… time will tell).