Finishing my Novel’s First Draft

A peek into my glamorous life

I’ve been writing a novel since Christmastime last year, and I have finally finished the first draft. I spend a lot of time on this newsletter talking about novels that other people wrote, but I thought it might be kind of fun to write, every once in a while, about what it’s been like to write one of my own. I’m thinking of this not as a “how to” series or writing tips or anything like that—more of a diary of the “artistic process.”

So here’s the “artistic process”: my girlfriend has a hard time getting up early in the morning, so our cat has learned that I am the one from whom she can expect a prompt breakfast. So she (that is, the cat) wakes me up around 5:50 a.m., but my girlfriend is not ready to go to the gym until around 6:45. So I have a little under an hour to clear out the dishwasher, get the coffee ready, clean the cat-box, and so on. Once I’m done with all that, I write my novel until my girlfriend wakes up. Then we go to the gym, and it’s time for my regular 9-5 workday. I usually get in about thirty minutes a morning.

Thrilling and artistic, isn’t it?

The truth is that my writing “process” is mostly just a manifestation of boneheaded stubbornness and grim determination: I sit down in the dining-room, with the sun just rising, and try to excrete 500 words a day. I started my first draft by writing the first sentence on page one, and I ended by writing the last sentence on the final page. I wrote every scene in order, except for one scene which I came up with early. I decided to change the ending of the book halfway through, so the draft is incoherent right now: the first chapter foreshadows an ending that no longer happens, and a short preface establishes a frame narrative that no longer makes sense. I’ll fix it later.

At this point I’m a little bit skeptical of the words-per-day metric as a measurement for productivity. I notice that the words-per-day goal allows me to phone things in. If I’m not feeling particularly excited about the book, I will dutifully plug away and put out my 500 words, but I imagine that those 500 words are not particularly interesting or valuable, and I sense that I’m going to eventually cut them. For maybe 40% of the first draft, I was not writing with much intensity or interest; I was just checking the box off, getting the task done for the day. Around two-thirds of the way through the process, I decided to focus not on word count but on the mental state I had while writing: I wanted to feel focused and intense during the writing process, and I still wanted to write quickly, but I didn’t want to think as much about the word count because I thought it was leading me to write makeshift dross just to make the magic number appear on my laptop screen. (On the other hand, I might ask: without demanding of myself a certain number of words per day, would I have finished the draft at all?)

Among the literary bloggers and Note-posters I read, there’s a certain kind of literary vitalism that imagines novel-writing as a sort of intense/emotional/spiritual/revelatory experience. I find that my own experience, at its worst, is like homework, and at its best, is something like working on a jigsaw puzzle that I have become obsessed with (if a jigsaw puzzle could, occasionally, make me laugh).

So I worry that my book will be workmanlike and bereft of delight for the reader because I have dutifully plugged away at it; I have heard, so many times before, that if one does not have fun while writing a book, the reader will not have much fun reading it. I wonder if this is true, or if a profoundly bored person could grinch out a novel that is delightful and fun to read.¹ This isn’t to say that I had no fun writing the first draft. But it is to say two things: first, that I enjoy revising a lot more than I enjoy drafting; and second, that many parts of the project were not finished out of a sincere, unstoppable gushing of delight and artistic transport but from a kind of dull doggedness: I have to get this done. It must be finished.

The first draft took about seven months. I’m writing a dissertation and a Substack, so this novel was on the back-back burner, but I still felt kind of annoyed at the sheer number of hours it took to generate a first draft. I also know that the first draft is quite bad—I’m honestly guessing that, when I read it next week, I will be slightly shattered at how dull, trite, slow-moving, and tedious it is, despite the fact that it isn’t much over 200 pages. This means that, by finishing a first draft, I am maybe a third of the way to writing a draft that another human being might conceivably want to read for fun, much less something that might be publishable (or, more realistically, Substack-serializable). I already know a new subplot that needs to be written, so the final product will be a fair amount longer.

But the point is: I finished a draft! I haven’t finished a draft of a novel since about ten years ago, when I wrote a humiliatingly bad novel at work, printing it out page by page and putting all of the pages in a three-ring binger. That novel, which was just unacceptable at all conceivable levels, ended up being around a hundred and ten pages. This draft is clocking in at over two hundred, making this the longest thing I’ve ever written. And as bad as this draft is, it’s much better than that draft was.

my little tiny baby

Is this how it always feels—as though you are always doing something wrong, that the thing you have written is compromised and embarrassing, that the writing itself was furtive and the time spent doing it was stolen from something that might be less of a gamble? (I could, after all, easily spend another seven months on the thing to find it completely unentertaining, which to me must be the dread fate I most want to avoid.) Probably.

Anyway, I printed the thing out. I’m going to put it in a drawer for a week, then read it. My girlfriend wants to read it, so I asked her to highlight the parts where she had fun and the parts where she was bored, since that’s the most important metric for me as I revise. (I just want every single page to be good fun.) Then, I’ll probably outline the thing and figure out how structure and plot need to change, rewrite it page by page, hopefully with the most egregious structural problems ironed out, and see where things go.

Until then, I’ll be posting more essays—about Henry James, finishing the interpretation series, and maybe even a reading of some poems—so I hope you’ll stay tuned.

1. “Grinch out” means exactly what it sounds like it means; I blame the phrase on a close family member who shall remain unnamed to protect their innocence. Anyway, the preferred method that this person used to inform the family that they needed to use the powder-room was to announce: “I’m going to go grinch out a loaf.”