Matt Uhrich - Writer

Malinda Lo on Writing the First Draft

Someone tweeted this post by Malinda Lo on how she writes her first drafts. Something she says in it jumped out at me.

But I think that what I’ve learned is that in the first draft, I should try to get everything on the page that could possibly be necessary to tell the story. Every extraneous plot strand, every potential theme. Some things won’t be in the right place; some things might actually turn out to be wrong for the story. (And new things will inevitably arise during revision.) But I need to do my best to put those ideas on the page in some form, so that when I come back in revision, I have something to work with.

That’s something I’d like to try. In the past, I’ve worried about only including the important stuff, that I would slow down to consider everything I wrote. Maybe if I just write everything and worry about cutting later, I’ll be able to write faster even if I’m writing far more words. I struggle with my internal editor as I write, and that’s something I’d like to be able to control. The most enjoyable writing times I’ve experienced are when I’ve been able to turn it off. Time slips by unnoticed and when I look up, thousands of words have been typed. Poor future me gets to decide if those words are worth keeping, but in the moment, it’s glorious.