There is a theory, championed by Anne Lamott and others, that you focus on getting a first draft on paper. Power through, don’t worry about quality of the prose or grammar or cohesion; just git ‘r done.
Most of the time, it makes sense. Beginners are especially susceptible to worrying about going the wrong direction and losing the potential of their story. Late-stage beginners and intermediate writers that have been part of critique groups worry about the quality of that draft, anticipating the criticism and corrections. Pantsers often develop a habit of polishing as they go because they need to reread and reread the incomplete first draft to gain momentum to write the next sentence, the next paragraph.
But you can’t edit or polish something that doesn’t yet exist, so it makes sense to focus on getting it down on paper.
I am a writer that edits as they go. I read what I’ve just written, and the thorns and slivers and mismatches annoy me. The simplest solution is to flag them with a different color text so I can ignore them, knowing that I will come back later.
Most of the time, I will push through to complete the first draft. But recently, I stopped when I hit the third scene in a short story I had already outlined. Writing this scene, I just felt like I was filling in blanks. Filling out a scene that *should* be fine for a first draft, but, it felt wrong. Fake. Thin.
When I write to prompts or do writing exercises or experiment with ideas, one in twenty will have what I call ‘legs’. The source might be a voice, or a writing style, or a character, or a particular tension or the setting, but something in that one fragment has an energy that makes it worthwhile extending to see if it can become a complete story.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it lives.
That third scene in the story didn’t feel alive. I found it distasteful to continue working on it. It was only going to be 200-300 words, so maybe I should have been able to push through it, but I was trying to go from point B to point D with writing that just tasted bad. Burnt, bitter, like rotting flesh. I considered skipping it and coming back later, but it was disheartening and I wondered whether it suggested that my entire story was not worthwhile, or if I needed to review the entire plan. It felt like something a beginner would have written, but I didn’t know how to make it better.
I stopped. Set it aside. Puzzled on it for a while. The scene was dialog and action within a clear setting. It set up the next scene where one character asks the primary character a crucial question.
The story was in close 3rd person, but because the scene added more characters and wasn’t focused on him or his thoughts, the proximity was much more distant than before.
I added a sentence of internal narrative. Then, a couple paragraphs later, a reaction from him.
And it came to life.
In my first attempt, I had lost the voice of the story. Because I thought I didn’t need internal narrative, I lost the tone and voice.
Later, I thought back to the previous novel that had become stuck. I had written 2/3 of it, then played around with alternatives until I found the ending that worked best. But I couldn’t bring myself to write it. The novel sat for three, four, maybe five years. I thought maybe the plan was faulty so I tried others, or maybe I needed to pants the rest of the novel too, which also failed.
It wasn’t until I realized that I had lost the voice of the main character that I could write it. I went back, revised the last couple of chapters to imbue them with her voice, and then I was able to carry on and complete it, using the outline.
The point is, getting a *hitty first draft is not a hard and fast rule, for me. Because I edit as I go, it has to be an acceptable springboard to the rest of the writing. And, there are times when something goes so far off the rails that I cannot bring myself to continue.
But, I’ve been writing long enough, now, that I know how to manage it.