7 things I learned while fast drafting

If I can even call it fast at all

I almost died in December, which naturally triggered a whole bunch of self-reflection. I’d barely written in weeks. I was at my wit’s end — with my draft, but mostly with myself. I was stuck. And I needed, more than anything, to get unstuck.

I committed to finishing my first draft by Apr. 1. It was a stretch goal in every sense of the term; writing over half of a book in three months was wildly unrealistic given the medical trauma I had just experienced. But I was stubborn and, admittedly, a touch delusional. I was going to finish this draft if it was the last thing I did.

On Apr. 6, less than six days after my original deadline, I wrote the final words of my third novel.

For me, fast drafting wasn’t fast. If anything, it was slow. But it taught me a lot about myself and how my writing brain works. I’m still wrestling with it, but for now, here are seven things I learned while fast drafting.

1. Knowledge is key. Lindsay Eagar talks about this in her course on fast drafting, “80/20: The Fast Draft Method.” To succeed, we need to understand what it is we’re writing. I found this to be true. Whenever I struggled with a chapter, it was invariably because my outline was weak. Likewise, the easiest chapters to draft were those I had plotted meticulously.

2. Sometimes it’s about sitting with the discomfort. So much of this draft was hard, to the point where I stared to question if I should even write it. I’ve talked about this before, how art is surrounded by myths of hardship and ease. We think it’s supposed to be easy (or hard), and if it’s not easy (or hard), we must be doing something wrong. But there is no right or wrong in art; there is only what works and what doesn’t. Some books are harder to write (or revise, or sell, or any number of things) than others. It doesn’t make them any less worthwhile.

3. Sometimes the discomfort is telling you something. I struggled with act 2A for weeks on end, only to realize my intuition had picked up on wonky character motivations. I wasn’t uncomfortable because I hated the story I was writing; I was uncomfortable because I knew subconsciously that something was wrong with the story I had plotted. Once I fixed the character motivations, drafting became easier again.

4. Speaking of act 2A: Every time I write a book, I convince myself somewhere around 40k words that I am actually the worst writer alive. This is the saggy middle talking, and has nothing to do with what I’m actually working on.

5. Sometimes it’s about taking a break. I hit a wall sometime in November, to the point where I couldn’t write a single word. I wasted a lot of time flinging myself at that wall, thinking I could break it with my body or, at the very least, my ironclad will. But it turned out that what I really needed was some time away. Only then could I return to the project with some amount of objectivity.

6. There are no perfect ideas. This is something Maggie Stiefvater teaches in her seminars (all of which I highly recommend). I struggled to move on from TSATS because it felt, in many ways, like the perfect book. It came to me in a lightning strike of inspiration. Drafting was a whirlwind, all dopamine and the first blush of love. I genuinely believed it was meant to be my debut. Shelving it felt like I was turning my back on my “big break.” But there are no perfect ideas; there is only the potential of what every idea can, in time, become.

7. First drafts are supposed to be messy. This is something I knew in abstract—what is a draft if not an iteration of the final product—but now I know it concretely, from experience. First drafts are supposed to be messy; they are supposed to be meandering, undisciplined behemoths. This is a breakthrough realization for me. I’m still a clean drafter at heart, but I think that, with each consecutive book, I’ll become a little more messy — and a little more free.