How to finish a draft

I love mess!

I have been working on my novel-in-progress for almost three years now, and finished a new full draft of it two days ago. I’m writing a book for the fifth! time, and every time is infuriatingly different, but some patterns have emerged over the 13 years since I started attempting to write them.

This is how, these days, various drafts get written:

I always start with what I call V0 – basically notes, any meandering idea, fragments, a process that is spread out over a few months or longer. It’s not the focussed writing of a draft-draft, a story with some kind of sustained narrative. V0 can be of variable length, but usually tends to be a good few thousand words long, before I rework it into the first “real” draft.

When working on V1, the Official First Draft, I write a synopsis first (which always changes) to give myself a loose plan, and then I try to finish it as quickly as possible, in order to keep up momentum. This usually takes about 2-3 months. Then I print off my V1, and edit it by hand, creating V2, the point where major changes are highlighted and tackled (though I know more are just waiting to come). I’ve probably reworked the synopsis by now, too.

After that, more drafts, so many more drafts, but any semblance of order or structure is gone by this point. From V3 onwards, chaos reigns.

At a beautiful writing spot in Tŷ Newydd, failing to finish a draft

This is also how I write drafts, these days:

V0 is fine. I’m just throwing out ideas when I can, merrily opening up a document still nebulous and full of whims. But then for V1 I know I need more structure if I’m going to stay motivated, so I try to prepare in advance by planning a bit of quieter time between other work, and then I find myself panicking for writing rather than pitching more for paid work, and then feel guilty because panicking time is writing time and I am wasting it! I put the appointment “WRITE NOVEL!!!” in my Google Calendar to recur every day so that I actually barely notice it, but it succeeds in making my calendar look stressful. I wake early, too early, in an attempt to make the most of time, and weekends pass in a weird, undemarcated haze. I give myself a lot of little treats, and I cry more, because I’m tired from all the early waking and fitting in other work and general life and also excavating my brain and coming up daily against my own inadequacy. I worry the book generally is unfixable, then tell myself not to worry, all that matters is finishing this draft, and I’ll fix it in the next one. I make a little chart with word-counts on it to spur myself on and then remember that keeping to a word-count is a false economy, I will literally just pad it out with words I’ll have to lose – better to focus on 500 good ones than reaching an arbitrary target – but also find myself on Reddit forums where people boast about writing 30,000 words in 2 days. Also, wonderfully, bursts of transcendent euphoria and lucidity and purpose, almost painfully hopeful moments of feeling very sincere about craft and how lucky I am to have writing, to have found this thing I love, and for it sometimes to love me back. I actually really enjoy being deep in a draft, when it’s going well. But it isn’t always going well!

I don’t know whether to call this draft V3 or V10. V1 was finished almost two years ago to the day, a pleasing symmetry. V2 followed, a few weeks later, in a burst of summer energy. But then nothing for two years, until now.

Except, not nothing – I was working on it a lot. Just ending up with what felt like little to show for it. I started and abandoned literally V3, V4, V5, V6, V7, V8, V9, getting various ways through them, but never finishing a whole draft. It was a mess! I still have every version open as a panic-inducing row of tabs on Pages, feeling vaguely superstitious about turning my back on them. The synopsis changed dramatically, as did voice and perspective, and I gained characters and lost characters, and I would feel absorbed but then – suddenly - I’d run out of steam or be seized with a new, better, way to do it, and fire up a new document.

I had a similar thing with my last novel, Cursed Bread, which I’ve spoken about before, so at first I didn’t mind. Having refigured that story of getting halfway through V1, before merrily throwing it in the bin – for the better! – as a learning experience rather than cautionary tale, I assumed, as it had then, that it would fall into place. It didn’t. This time I kept rewriting the first several thousand words over and over, for well over a year, feeling infuriated and, often, stuck. Sometimes, though, there was a glimmer. Each draft took me a little closer, showed me a little more both of what was wrong with the story, and what was possible.

So now I am here at V3/V10, finally another finished draft, and writing this draft was easier than I thought it would be. I took a little time away from it, some breathing room. When it was time to return, with some trepidation, it turned out I had been working out the knots, writing it in my head, all the time I hadn’t been writing. Sometimes you need to get it wrong before you get it right. Though, talk to me again at at V4/V25, in three years time, and maybe I won’t be so serene.