Mike Gayle on First Drafts
October 17th 2007 18:57
Found this at Mike Gayle’s website:
“At first go easy on yourself — This is important. With my first draft I insisted on cutting myself loads of slack. It didn’t have to be perfect. It didn’t even have to make sense. It just needed to be at least 80,000 words long and have a beginning and an end. The proudest moment of my writing career so far is that first draft. No matter how terrible the contents I knew that I had done something most people only ever talk about. “
I know exactly what he means by that last sentence, it’s the way I felt when I finished NaNoWriMo for the first time. It has to be said, though, that this first draft is not likely to turn into anything similar to My Legendary Girlfriend because my first novel still sucks, and the version of My Legendary Girlfriend that finally made it into print is one of my favourite novels.
“At first go easy on yourself — This is important. With my first draft I insisted on cutting myself loads of slack. It didn’t have to be perfect. It didn’t even have to make sense. It just needed to be at least 80,000 words long and have a beginning and an end. The proudest moment of my writing career so far is that first draft. No matter how terrible the contents I knew that I had done something most people only ever talk about. “
I know exactly what he means by that last sentence, it’s the way I felt when I finished NaNoWriMo for the first time. It has to be said, though, that this first draft is not likely to turn into anything similar to My Legendary Girlfriend because my first novel still sucks, and the version of My Legendary Girlfriend that finally made it into print is one of my favourite novels.
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