How to Neglect Your Novel

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but a better side effect is its ability to pull you out of your head to see things with fresh eyes. The same way it erases the bad breath or annoying laugh of that long-distance significant other, it makes you forget what you intended to say, leaving only the actual words you wrote. This mental purging is a critical part of the writing process. To get there, you need to break up with your first draft.

Setting the work down and walking away is tough, but the patience to let a first draft sit is as important as the discipline it took to write it. This process is long and often frustrating, but if you’re already itching for more, congratulations—you’re addicted like the rest of us.

First Draft Rehab

I recommend at least three months, cold turkey. Away means away. Shut it in a drawer. Close the file. Wipe the story from your brain. As impossible as it sounds, you’ll remember what free time was like. You’ll stop obsessing over potential plot twists and character arcs. You’ll actually listen to a conversation instead of politely nodding while you choreograph a fight scene in your head.  

But as you switch into “writer on hiatus” mode, keep a section of each day carved out for writing. Not touching your last work in progress doesn’t mean you can’t start a new one. If you’re not ready to invest in another long work, write a shorter story, but write something. Stephen King didn’t get famous sipping mai tais at the beach for three months. He also didn’t confuse the work for magic.

If, like me, you dream of one day making a career from your writing, start treating it like a job now. I don’t mean slumping through your office door to spend obligatory time staring dead-eyed at your laptop, though those days are sure to come. A major benefit of being an artist is not needing a degree to get your foot in the door, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need an education.

Focus on the Fundamentals

If you’ve made it past the first draft, you have some grasp on how to write a sentence, but adequate sentences aren’t the same as great ones. Great sentences take work, and most of that work comes from understanding the fundamentals: grammar, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and basic sentence structure. You might look at this list and laugh, but never forget: understanding is miles from mastery.

An Amazon search will turn up an exhaustive list of books on those topics. I recommend you start with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which reads like a textbook but is widely considered the writer’s bible. Other books on my personal shelf are Mary DeVries’s The Practical Writer’s Guide, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, James Cochrane’s Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English, and Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase. None of them are going to be page turners, especially at first, but their effect on your writing will be profound.

Develop Your Process

No matter how hard you avoid it, your eyes will eventually drift to that drawer and that file where your first draft lies sleeping. Waiting. You’ll get the itch. The withdrawal. Aren’t you wasting time better spent cashing royalty checks? A good scratch without prematurely starting revisions is to study process.

Books on process will help you decide how to tackle the second draft when the time comes. Mentioned in a previous post, Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need is an excellent place to start (though I disagree with the subtitle). Lisa Cron’s Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel and Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts are also good resources. Some writers have paid their talent forward by writing memoirs on the craft, but so far I can only recommend Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (not because the rest are bad—I just haven’t gotten around to them).

Podcasts are another potential well of insight and personal development. The two I keep on a fairly consistent rotation are “Helping Writers Become Authors” and “DIY MFA,” but a search of any service that provides podcasts will get you to plenty more. Just keep in mind that writing is as subjective as any other art form. Not all advice is going to work for you, but I recommend testing as much of it as you’re willing. Allowing your writing to grow stale is one of the hardest mistakes to recover from.

Now for some good news. All that homework I just put on your plate should be only a fraction of your developmental strategy. Personally, I reserve every third book on my reading list for something on craft, but I’m a slow reader. Faster readers might opt for one every five books or even one a month. As long as you regularly throw one in, you’ll see improvement in your writing.

Read with an Agenda

So what about the rest of the time? Read what you want, but I recommend having a goal for each book you pick up. In fiction, lean toward the same genre as your work in progress, studying at the feet of the masters who came before you. You can also consider the tools missing from your writing toolbox. Need to write better love scenes, even for a single chapter in your sci-fi epic? Read romance. Staging a sword fight in the climax of your historical recreation of the French Revolution? Read fantasy. Figure out what you need and target your reading list accordingly.

In college, I took a film class on book adaptations. I went in as a movie buff earning easy credits but came out the other side with a new perspective on story structure. Though I’d seen most of the movies we covered, I never bothered reading the books they were based on. If I knew the story, what was the point?

The point is this: despite what I said earlier, writing is a little like magic. It involves types of tricks every other magician knows but each performs in their own way. Knowing the major plot points and twists, you free your brain to look deeper at how the writer set them up. Once you deconstruct those tricks to see how they’re done, you’ll come up with ways to do them better, or at least differently, than all the other magicians.

Write What You Know (by Learning What You Don’t)

A balanced diet needs vegetables, and a well-rounded reading list needs nonfiction. Trust me, I get it. Like a kid at the pantry, snatching Oreos instead of Triscuits, my instinct is to reach for fiction. But as the old advice goes, write what you know. So what do you know? Think of it more as “what do you need to learn?” The answer is “everything,” but who has that kind of time?

A great place to start is back with the manuscript gathering cover page dust. It has a setting and characters with jobs and hobbies. A fight scene on an airplane. A chance meeting at an island bar. Riders on horseback or motorcycles or jet packs. I’m betting something in your first draft exists in a mental blind spot. Maybe you saw it in a movie and recreated something similar on the page. Building your base knowledge will add a layer of authenticity that keeps your readers reading, which is pretty much the name of the game.

Paired with whatever new story you write in active neglect of your first draft, a well-rounded reading list is going to make you better in the ways that matter. Then one day, you’ll open that drawer or desktop folder with the resources you need to face the next, and potentially toughest, challenge in the writing process—the second draft.

Note: I think I've found a better way to post the chapters from the prematurely published first novel (fingers crossed). If interested, the "Novels" tab on the main menu should take you to the book's cover, which gets you to the book page. If not, I'll keep working on it.