This week’s Monday Maxim is of particular relevance to me. I’m well into the first draft of The Raindancer; granted, not as far as I’d like to be right now, but I’ll save that story for another day. The basic idea behind a first draft is to just get the book out of your head and onto paper (be it real or virtual) within the most basic parameters of your outline without editing yourself into writer’s block. The consensus among great writing minds is that there’ll be plenty of time to edit, re-edit, and edit some more later. (For more on the rigors also known as writing, click here.)
Unknowing, that’s exactly what I did when I wrote the first draft of Walking Tall. I set limits for what the book would include, fired up my laptop, and wrote straight through to the end. (That’s the beauty of non-fiction: you tell it like you saw it.) At the completion of the first draft, I moved into the second draft cutting, copying, and pasting sections all over the place; adding newly gathered facts; and conducting interviews to job my memory.
I’m finding that writing this first draft of The Raindancer is a whole-nother animal altogether. While it is based on real life events, it’s a fictionalized account. What that means is I’m taking the truth of certain incidents and having to create richly textured world and populate it with believable doppelgängers.
The challenge in writing this first draft has been that I’ve been trying to make sense of it all much too soon when the rule of thumb is “just get something on the page.” Why?
I’ve been afraid of hitting a foul ball. Or worse yet, striking out.
But thanks to encouragement from writers and non-writers alike, things are rolling along.
Do you remember any recent incidents where you were plagued with fear instead of giving yourself permission to make an occasional strike?