That’s true—though I think it’d be safe to say that “every first draft is terrible” is something you could say about the vast majority of writers… for sure there are mozarts in the world of writing—but I’d be very surprised if there were many.
Most of my short stories tend to be first drafts, not counting minor edits like changing individual words or making occasional refinements to sentence structure. But then my short stories really are pretty short, so I don’t know to what degree this will generalize to novels yet.
As for my non-fiction books, the process has usually been such that the concept of a first draft isn’t really valid. I don’t write them straight through and then refine, instead I’ll write parts of one chapter and then another in non-linear order, then revise some of what I’ve already written, toss out parts of the book to be replaced with something better, and so forth. By the time I finally have a “first draft” of the whole book, large parts of the content have already been edited several times.
From my (limited) experience, novels are very different to short stories. You can hold the whole concept of a short story in your head at one time.. but novels are big and slippery. Things change and develop as you write—so you often have to go back and rewrite or even delete huge swathes of things to fit the new pattern and flow.
There are some people who can do without this—but IMO they’re either brilliant writing geniuses (to whom we should not compare ourselves) or they’re incredibly experienced writers who started out by going through the major-overhaul process… but who have now honed their talent so much they no longer need it… leaving us still in need, generally, of rewriting.
This is not to say that maybe you’re an exception—or maybe you’re much better at planning (and sticking to the plan) than me :)
That’s true—though I think it’d be safe to say that “every first draft is terrible” is something you could say about the vast majority of writers… for sure there are mozarts in the world of writing—but I’d be very surprised if there were many.
Most of my short stories tend to be first drafts, not counting minor edits like changing individual words or making occasional refinements to sentence structure. But then my short stories really are pretty short, so I don’t know to what degree this will generalize to novels yet.
As for my non-fiction books, the process has usually been such that the concept of a first draft isn’t really valid. I don’t write them straight through and then refine, instead I’ll write parts of one chapter and then another in non-linear order, then revise some of what I’ve already written, toss out parts of the book to be replaced with something better, and so forth. By the time I finally have a “first draft” of the whole book, large parts of the content have already been edited several times.
From my (limited) experience, novels are very different to short stories. You can hold the whole concept of a short story in your head at one time.. but novels are big and slippery. Things change and develop as you write—so you often have to go back and rewrite or even delete huge swathes of things to fit the new pattern and flow. There are some people who can do without this—but IMO they’re either brilliant writing geniuses (to whom we should not compare ourselves) or they’re incredibly experienced writers who started out by going through the major-overhaul process… but who have now honed their talent so much they no longer need it… leaving us still in need, generally, of rewriting.
This is not to say that maybe you’re an exception—or maybe you’re much better at planning (and sticking to the plan) than me :)