A Metaphor for My First Draft

Some people are shoveling sand. I’m digging a swimming pool.

Photo by Dallas Reedy on Unsplash

I’m writing a contemporary Young Adult novel. And I’m all in.

I habitually work on my story for at least two hours, five or six (sometimes seven) days a week. I wrote 50,000 words last year during NaNoWriMo. I worked with a book coach (KC Karr, from Author Accelerator) from February to July of this year to help me shape my ideas. I worked with my coach again in September to help me recalibrate when I decided to take my novel in a different direction.

This is my first crack at a novel. Being a beginner is challenging for many reasons. Take, for instance, the overwhelming number of moving parts involved in writing a book that Jennie Nash, owner of Author Accelerator, so beautifully summarized in a recent newsletter:

Whether you are writing a novel, a memoir, or a nonfiction book, you have to choose a shape or structure for your book; you have to determine what goes in and what stays out; you need to learn how to convey emotion on the page, how to write dialogue, how to write a scene or an argument; you need to learn how to make a sentence both correct and pleasing, how to move through the material over time, where to begin and where to end. There are a thousand things to master — and that doesn’t even touch on marketing the book and connecting with readers.
— Jennie Nash

This list doesn’t scare me. It excites me. I’m thrilled to be throwing myself into something this intellectually rigorous and emotionally complex. I’m ready to do the work. I’m ready to learn.

There’s only one thing that scares me right now, and maybe it scares you, too, because of all the work you’ve put into your story.

Not finishing.

I’m pleased with my progress as a writer. Working with a book coach helped me learn so much about the many concepts I’ll need to master in order to write a compelling novel. I’m starting to see my story take shape after more than a year of work. I’ve outlined it. I can see the tentpoles holding it up. I know, generally, how things are going to wrap up.

But I still haven’t written The End.

Until I can prove to myself that I’m capable of finishing, I’m going to be scared that I won’t.

When asked how they wrestle with the self-doubt and uncertainty that comes along with writing a novel, accomplished authors often say they know it’s a process, they’ve finished books before and they know they’ll do it again. Their faith in themselves and their current project is based on their past performances.

That’s all fine. I get it. But what about us noobs?

How do cope when you haven’t done it before?

You can learn how to write by reading, taking classes, working through exercises in craft books, writing short stories.

I’ve done most of these things. Unfortunately, none of it really seems to matter because I don’t just want to learn how to write. I want to learn how to write a novel. And, as it turns out, the only way to learn how to do the thing (write a novel) is by actually doing the damn thing (writing the novel).

So what do I do when my fear of not finishing what I started threatens to throw me off on any given writing day? What do I do when I’m swirling around in my first draft, unable to draw on memories of what it was like when I wrote my last novel? How do I deal with the fact that I’m incapable of “banging out” a crappy first draft?

Well. I imagine I’m digging a swimming pool.

How a metaphor for the drafting process can help.

Hear me out.

I read a weekly newsletter from the University of Pittsburgh. It deals mostly with academic writing, but it has a lot of great tips for type-A overachievers trying to prioritize their writing. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve come across is the concept of creating a metaphor for the writing process.

“Unrealistic expectations for the production of writing often emerge from a lack of awareness of the length, depth, and oscillations of our own writing process.”
— Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD

Dr. Rockquemore suggests that having a handle on how your writing process unfolds makes it easier to manage expectations when you’re knee deep in a project. The metaphor allows you to easily pinpoint what part of the process you’re in. In the newsletter, she cited an author who likens every part of her writing process to having a baby (conception to birth).

Having never made it the entire way through the process, I realized it could also be helpful to come up with a metaphor for the first draft.

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
— Shannon Hale

I like the whole idea of shoveling, but, considering the way I draft (very slowly and methodically and often revisiting the beginning after I discover something that happens along the way) I find it better to think about the hole I’m digging in the ground rather than the pile of dirt I’m leaving in my wake.

That’s why I came up with the metaphor of digging a swimming pool.

A pool, like a novel, has both length and depth. As someone who’s never made it to The End, it’s really easy for me to get all caught up in the length. I know my novel needs to be about 300 pages long, so when I see my page count increasing slowly or not at all, I can get discouraged. Fast.

That’s when I try to remind myself that my novel isn’t just going to get longer the closer I get to finishing it. It’s also going to get deeper. In order for it to be done, the digging needs to happen in two directions. Sometimes the work I’m doing on my book doesn’t feel like progress because I’m digging down instead of out.

I have to dig in both directions in order to write the book I want to write. I have to go down and out. I have to get to The End and I also need to get to The Bottom.

I know some people will tell me I’m doing it all wrong and that banging out that fast, crappy first draft is the only way I’m ever going to finish. But, for now, this is the way I know how to write a novel and this is the only way I’ve been able to keep putting one word after the next. And that’s good enough for me.

Now that I’ve shown you my metaphor, I hope you’ll show me yours.