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When you got behind the wheel of a car for the very first time did you expect to be able to drive perfectly? Not only perfectly, but to drive so well you could drive in the Indy 500 and win? Of course you didn’t, because that would be beyond unrealistic, it would crazy talk; right? Right.
So why do so many people believe they should be able to sit down and write a novel the first time out, not only a novel, but that their first draft, first sentences, will capture exactly the brilliant colors and images in their heads. They seem to expect their day dreams and fantasies to spill out of their finger tips in a perfect flow first time out of the box. When this miracle of perfection doesn’t happen in the first few lines, or paragraphs, or pages, they get discouraged and give up, or start revising right away trying to make it perfect. I’ve now lost count of the number of people who have told me about the first chapter, or three chapters, of their book that they have been revising for the last three, five, eight, ten years. When they get the beginning perfect they’ll finish the book. The chances of them ever finishing their book is about zero, because perfectionism is damn near impossible to achieve in a first draft, especially the first time you try to write.
When I first started writing book length stories I found the 70/30 rule, or the garbage quotient. 70% of a first draft is garbage, 30% of it is gold, but I had to write all 100% to get that percentage of gold. The stuff I could keep and was actually good was scattered in among the crap of the rest. If I’d waited for a perfect first draft I’d have never finished a book. Perfection, if it exists, comes with editing that rough stuff into finished product. When I talked to the woman who would be my first agent, her first question was, “How many drafts of your first novel have you done?” My reply, “Seven.” That was an answer that let her know I was serious and not caught in the perfection trap. I went home and did one more edit of my first novel and sent it off. Months later she’d take me on as a client, and I had an agent. It would take almost four years for the book to hit the shelves, but that’s another story. The point is that writing, good, professional writing is rewriting.
I’ve now written over thirty novels and my garbage quotient has gotten lower just by practice and knowing my craft. Some first drafts are 80% gold and only 20% garbage, but not always. Sometimes it’s more like 50/50. It just depends on the book. I routinely throw out hundreds of pages in a book, winnowing it down through edits and that’s before it ever leaves me and goes to New York for my editor to read.
So, the next time you look at those great notes for your story, or novel, and think, “I can’t get it perfect. It won’t match the vision in my head.” And you get frustrated and stuck before you begin, or soon after you begin, just take a deep breath and keep going. Plow through like a bull in a china shop, break everything in sight heading for your goal of being able to type, “The End,”. You can clean up all that broken mess in the next draft, and put in new cabinets the draft after that, and when the room (the draft) is close to done buy new china and put it in just the way you like it, and know, just know that with every book you’re going to destroy your idea, your dream, and make you want to weep at the ruin of your bright dreams like broken porcelain scattered in bright pieces across your desk, but know, absolutely know, that you can fix it later, but to give yourself something to fix ya gotta break it first. You’ve got to be willing to be really bad, to be really good.