Finishing your first draft.

From the time I was a little kid I wanted to write a book. I wrote a lot in high school, but I was never able to finish a first draft of anything I started. As it tends to do, life got in the way, and writing got put on the back burner for quite a while. Years, actually.

Present day Tiffani finally decided she’d had enough and it was time to pick up the pen again. I was going to write a book. I was determined. I was finally going to make it happen. So on March 14th of 2021 I opened up a word document and started typing. I threw myself at it with wild abandon. I was woefully unprepared, but all I knew was that I had to write a book and I wasn’t going to stop until its done.

The story I’d selected for my first book was one that had been rolling around between my ears, demanding to be written, for at least a decade. It was a simple story. A failed hero has to face his past with an unlikely side kick and save the world. I had the whole plot line from start to finish and I knew all the characters. I just had to get it on paper and fill in the details This would be easy.

Spoiler alert: it was not easy.

There were two key strategies that really helped me make it through my first draft.

1) - Write every day. I made a point to sit down and write every single day. Some days I was only able to write one or two sentences. Other days I was able to bust out 2000+ words. I learned quickly that writing is very much a roller coaster, but if you stick with it it’s absolutely worth the highs and lows.

2) - NO EDITING (until you’re done). This is probably some of the best advice one of my writing mentors has given me. Dustin recommended that I set a rule that I could not go back and edit anything until I had completely finished my first daft. This made me absolutely, utterly, miserable at times. In hindsight, this was also absolutely key to me finishing my first draft. Don't get stuck in editing hell before you've finished your first draft or you’ll never finish. I had to press on. I had to let my first draft be bad. (Which is a topic for another post). I would have the opportunity to come back and fix it in the second draft, (and third, and fourth, and fifth…) but getting through the first draft was my top priority.

I put all my other hobbies on hold. I got up, went to work, stopped at the gym on my way home, and when I got home I’d take out my laptop and write for as long as I could manage. For weeks, I wrote like my life depended on it. At 12:37AM on Sunday August 1st, 140 days after I started my first draft, I wrote “The end.”

It was a breakneck pace, and when I sit down to write my next book, I doubt I’ll write that fast. It was mentally and emotionally exhausting. That being said, I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of myself than when I finished my first draft. It was worth every minute.