Tyranny of the First Draft

It is a question I get a lot: Do you think Hans Christian Andersen really thought about the kind of things that The Book Architecture Method teaches, like scene and series and theme? First of all, there’s evidence that he did: the original title of “The Ugly Duckling” was “The Young Swans.” Thank God he changed that, huh? It would have ruined everything…and besides, that title is just not good!

On a more serious note, the change in the title indicates that Andersen became progressively more aware of what he was writing—and that he made an important choice regarding what he wanted his story to be about. That is known as “cresting the mountain” in our method, having assessed honestly what your book is about so that you can go further into what you want it to be about.

But let’s go back to the original question. Do I really think Andersen thought about his craft to the level that we are thinking about his craft, and our own?

Underneath this question are two unstated assumptions:

• Andersen and other “famous” writers are better writers than we are, and don’t need to go through the same processes that we do. Because they’re just geniuses and stuff.
• Thinking too hard about what you are doing creatively will ruin it, because that’s somehow not Zen. Or at least that’s not where true inspiration comes from.

To a certain degree, the kind of magical thinking that these assumptions represent is natural. We are engaged in creating something new. Because it is new we don’t know where it came from, by virtue of it not having been here before. We might even pray to this mysterious source, anthropomorphize it and try to speak to it (and listen to it!)

I know I do. But that’s different from believing that every word that came to us the first time is qualitatively better than any word that will come to us the next time. When we persist in believing that certain elements in our document can’t be rearranged or eliminated—that they came, in other words, and that’s that—that’s when we start to suffer from the tyranny of the first draft.

It might just as well be called the “tyranny of the previous draft,” because any draft that is done, that has been sent to an editor or is sitting in the printer, is somehow more authoritative than what we will produce in the future. But judging from the past fruits of our creative process, this feeling is only an illusion. Everything changes. It’s the courage to help our material evolve that we need to summon, so that it can actually improve, as opposed to stagnate or try to intimidate us.

LINKS

The Book Architecture Method: Method page

better writers than we are: Just not that Good a Writer

listen to it: Role of the Prompter

sent to an editor: Stop Writing now