The first draft

A lot of people want to write a book. In my experience, I thought this was a matter of putting pen to paper and simply letting the words flow. The story would craft itself. My first draft of my book was a hot mess. And I learned how very wrong and naive that idea was. Continuity, did not exist, simply grammatical errors plagued the manuscript, ideas were convoluted and distorted. In short it was bad. But that's okay I'd put 88,000 words on a page and bam, I had a book. A book no one in their right mind would want to read. I made the following critical time consuming mistakes.

First, there was no outline. I let my fingers take me where they wanted and this led to a lot of subplots that made no sense, or in some cases made the story that much worse. There was a long process of going back rewriting, or in some cases cutting, entire sections of the book. The second was underestimating the magnitude of this kind of work. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can write a story. It doesn't mean that it is going to be good or worth sharing with the world, but you can write it. To make a story good you have to really be willing to commit the time and effort to the craft. I had to be willing to sit there and objectively look at the manuscript and be willing to cut, destroy, and remove pieces that I found were amazing to write, but ultimately did nothing for the story. Not everyone can do this.

Another powerful hurdle, being decisive. As the author I had to make decisions, because literally no one else could. There have to be rules, and then you have to adhere to them. Action must be taken in a manner that reflects with the character, but it must be taken. So many sentences were seemed this, and could be that, this is garbage. It's fine for a first draft, but at some point the characters must do something, must act. Again this sounds easy, it is not. These ideas and characters are a reflection of yourself or your opinions. As such when writing a surprising amount of self learning takes place. Even in the genera of fantasy where everything comes from the writers mind this is prevalent, perhaps even more so. When writing the decision making process rests entirely upon your shoulders and it can be a heavy burden. But one well worth learning, I really had to think about the message, the idea, I was trying to get across to my readers. This might be more important than any content in the book. So before you begin writing ask yourself; What are you trying to say?