So who says you should get a first draft down before you revise?

I'm here to question if it's really necessary, or best, to nail down that first draft. As one who's gone against the advice and has instead worked on revising the first half multiple times, I can see some benefits to do it this way.

I'm still riding a high from my recent writer's group critique of my prologue and a couple opening chapters from the point of view of Asher, the central character. It's the first time I've felt my writing in this novel has finally arrived. It was amazing to hear the fellow writers/readers talk about the characters, getting exactly what I wanted them to get, seeing the characters exactly the way I'd hoped they'd be seen. Also, I've been through enough drafts (7? 13?) of that prologue that I've finally arrived at a narrative voice that I'm starting to like. (Click here to read the prologue.) To be told I had a strong narrative style was amazing to hear. I fall in love with novels because of their voice--and knowing how important it is, I have long felt the real lack of that in my novel-in-progress. I guess I'm learning a first-time novelist's lesson: maybe that voice and style doesn't, or at least not always, pour out, whole and gripping in the first draft. It took me many to get there. It took me years to get comfortable in my characters' shoes enough to speak for them, to let the poetry begin to seep out as I tell their story. I've long been frustrated by how bare my prose has been in recent years. Because I've been working at freelancing for magazines I thought to perhaps blame that. Other moments, I tell myself I'm really just primarily trying to figure out plot and my characters--how can I expect my prose to sing like poetry? But as I read aloud my pieces last week to my writer's group, I saw that it was there, finally. The writing was good.

It's not done. But it's much closer to the kind of rich writing I used to do in poems and short narrative essays. Man, is a novel ever a different kind of beast to deal with!

And that is why I can see the merits of writing, rewriting, revising and editing the beginning before getting to the end. Because I have done so, I think my yet-unwritten second half has got to be better. I've revised my way into knowing my novel enough to have a glimpse of its ending.

I've been feeling really bad that my novel still hasn't seen the end of a single draft. I've been working on it 4 years, or 6 if you count the 2 years I created the 2 short stories which eventually became the impetus for the novel. I've got maybe 60,000 words and no end in sight. I've heard again and again that i just need to get that first draft nailed down--a sketch even, so I can then later go back and fill in the details and subplots, etc. I even bought the book on how to write novel in 30 days, outlining how you do this bare bones type of draft. (I never intended to use the 30 day perimeter, but I saw the merit in doing the method)

I've had little forward momentum on the plot because I've spent a lot of time going back over my first half. (Largely exacerbated by having joined an online critique group that needs to read from the beginning, making me want to spruce up every chapter before I sent it.) Part of the reason I couldn't nail down the second half is because I simply don't have a really good handle on it. I sort of know some events and outcomes, but the few times I've tried to write ahead, I got stalled, or simply trashed it, because i didn't have great insight into my characters' emotional landscapes.  I just now am realizing a lot of that is due to the fact that i didn't know my characters well enough, because I didn't write them deep enough in the beginning. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'd been avoiding one of my main characters and writing from his point of view. And I have to say, finally facing him, writing a few opening chapters form his perspective, has really grounded me in the time and place of my novel in a way I hand't yet been. With him in place, all my other characters' psyches are deepening. This work has transformed my beginning, and I'm sure, as I go about editing the middle, it'll transform that, maybe even change it significantly.

So here's to questioning well-tested advice for writers. But I do know I do eventually need to heed it--I still DO have nail down that first draft,  all the way through! I'm just now maybe not going to beat myself up over the fact that I didn't do it first.

Some examples of journalism that I blamed for my bare-bones prose:
Acidity in Your Diet Linked with Weight Loss Struggle, Depression and Degenerative Disease

Antidepressants: If They Work Due to the Placebo Effect, What is The Harm in That?

Chef Jamie Oliver Versus School Lunches: Where Do The Dietary Guidelines Come From Anyway?

How to Determine If Your Child is Ready to Begin Kindergarten

The prologue to the Asher novel

This whole blog is talking ABOUT this novel. Well, for anyone who wants to read a part of it, here's the prologue that has been through maybe 10-20 revisions in 6 years... From 30+ page short story to this very small opening...

Working title: Still House

PROLOGUE—November 13, 1978

            Maizy knew her baby would die, long before she went into labor. But one look at Curt’s face as he held his firstborn, a scrawny, wriggling four-pound form, told her that he was still in denial. The look of hope and wonder on his face broke her heart, even as sympathy for him comingled with a trace of contempt for his optimism. 

            “Created to glorify God,” Curt said as he peered into the baby’s opaque eyes set in puffy lids. He didn’t even try to stem the emotion overpowering his face. She turned her head away.

When a nurse asked if they’d chosen a name, Curt responded, “Asher.” Maizy opened her mouth to protest this name they’d argued over, but no sound came. By default, she let Curt have this one small privilege. Though to her it was ridiculous—naming the infant “glad,” under the circumstances.

She watched a proud daddy study his son through eyelashes webbed with tears, but the miracle of life was lost on her. She remembered feeling that way about her firstborn, her daughter Camille. But this time was different.

The baby threw his head back in a wail. “That’s the most hopeful sound in the world,” Curt whispered, throwing Maizy a glance.

Her heart sank. He just didn’t get that this baby wasn’t going to make it. His birth weight was low, his lungs weren’t strong. And he was born on the thirteenth. Not that she put much stock in unlucky numbers, but she thought all these facts might give him pause to consider that her premonitions and nightmares had been right. It still surprised her that he didn’t believe her, because it was in his Bible where she’d found that story about David and Bathsheba and their baby who died.

            That story that had kept her up nights and haunted her dreams through the whole of her pregnancy didn’t relent when the baby survived the fourth day, surprising the doctors. Each day he lived made her more anxious about when he would die.

She obsessed about her guilt and contemplated the sequence of events that led her here. She wondered when the point of no return had occurred—was it when Curt showed up at the house she had shared with her husband Stephen, joking about the two front porch doors of the centuries’ old home? Was it the day later that summer when he fell against her knees, confessing his love? Or had it been years before, when she’d met him, a hungry eyed college freshman?

In a week, the baby improved enough to go home. Maizy had never prepared for that. She treated it as temporary. She realized the story never said how old Bathsheba’s baby had been when he died; it could take months. Then when Asher reached three months, she had never yet organized his clothes in drawers or bought anything in the next size. She was finding the passage of time cruel; the waiting was just too hard. Especially while everyone else around her was rejoicing at the baby’s progress. So she tried to survive by numbing herself to that life and simply completing each day as a series of chores, each only freeing her to the obligation of the next.

One dark February morning, Curt cradled his miracle child in the crook of his arm as he ate his oatmeal, as he did every morning. He soaked in the minutes, delaying his departure for work until the last possible moment, then rose from the kitchen chair to hand the baby off to Maizy, as usual. She turned her head so his lips hit her cheek.

“Bye, my little tiger,” he said as he held Asher in the air, legs kicking spastically in blue pajamas. “Grow bigger and stronger for Daddy! I wish I could be the one to enjoy the day with you,” Curt added, lingering, before rushing out the door.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Maizy laid the baby in the playpen as if his body stung her hands. She shivered in the icy air that swirled around her ankles in Curt’s wake and that set the radiator to popping and hissing. She turned from the playpen, not expecting to look in it again until absolutely necessary. He was the tell-tale heart of their transgressions. At times she swore she saw his eyes turning amber, like Curt’s. And his black hair, like her own, was lightening to Curt’s brown. She remembered she’d once been desperate in her desire for Curt—for years—but now she despised him for what that desire had propelled her to.

Maizy turned to her next duty: spoon-feeding eighteen month old Camille. She did it mindlessly, staring at the metal cupboards the girl’s father had repainted for her. All the words of  Lady MacBeth’s “Out, damned spot” soliloquy, which she’d memorized in college, rushed back to her mind again. She watched her hands mime washing off the blood of Lady MacBeth’s muder victim. To everyone else, her hands looked clean, but the blood she saw on them was so thick and heavy it weighed her down to immobility much of every day.

The knowledge of how Stephen died—was killed—and how her son was born, made her want to run screaming into oncoming traffic or drown herself in the Susquehanna River visible from her porch. Going through the motions and not thinking was the only way she could quell the surges that threatened to bury her.

There had been moments, even days, of hope. Curt whisking her off to the courthouse a couple weeks after his divorce came through was one of those moments. She’d thought the legal stamp of marriage would make things right, but it had done nothing but make the nightmares of their baby’s death more vivid.

            Camille grabbed the spoon from Maizy’s limp grasp, and Maizy barely noticed. She ignored the cries rising from the playpen. Camille, tongue darting from one corner of her mouth to the other, began fingerpainting with  applesauce. She squealed to see it fly. Then she flung her spoon straight at her mother, as bulls-eye to her mother’s forehead as a creek stone from David’s sling. But it was the hit that resurrected her.

 Maizy bolted upright. She wiped the applesauce dripping into her eye and saw her daughter with a new focus. She smiled through tears as she watched how her daughter’s giggle pushed her dimple deep into her cheek. Oh, how Camille resembled Stephen, her good, good dark-haired father. She resolved not to live this death anymore. She had been letting circumstances steal her life and her daughter from her. Maizy refused to lose one more day that the advent of Asher had stolen from them.

“Oh, Cami,” she sighed as she lifted the girl from her chair. Asher wailed upon hearing her voice, and Maizy made two more decisions. First, she knew they needed to move out of this house and its mustard gold linoleum that Stephen had installed for her right before Cami’s birth. The house itself was her Scarlet Letter, chaining her to all the memories and solitary confinement within its walls as long as she lived in this neighborhood.

Second, she needed to wean the baby, immediately. Though she knew the doctor would give her a hard time, she could no longer tolerate it. The contact of his skin made hers crawl. Her neck was raked red raw from her fingers clawing it every second the baby suckled. It was a sham anyway—doing the best to preserve his life which she knew was doomed. His fate was sealed, but at least she could try to preserve herself and be more than a wooden doll for her daughter. And so she chose her new occupation to consume her while waiting for her son to die: she invested everything she had into Camille.

 Do feel free to leave comments--tell me what it leaves you wondering, what piques your interest or sympathy....