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by Rebecca Behrens

 

I used to think that the raw materials for writing were paper and a pencil—or a new Word document, as the case may be. A blank page is what a writer uses to craft her story, much like a sculptor uses a lump of clay to make a statue.

Patron Post: Lumpy First Drafts by Rebecca Behrens

Patron Post: Lumpy First Drafts by Rebecca Behrens

And so I envisioned my own writing process as being like making a sculpture: I’d start with a fresh, shapeless document and by the end of a first draft, I’d have molded it into the story I’d been trying to tell all along.

 

Let’s pretend this story is a statue of a person. At the end of that first draft, maybe the arms would need adjustment; maybe I’d need to do a lot of detail work on the face’s expression. But you’d be able to see clearly that I’d made a human form, of about the right height and with all parts more or less intact.

 

Except that’s not at all how my first drafts turn out. Despite the months of thought and work, sometimes they don’t resemble . . . anything. At least not clearly. Is it a person? A shrub? A sea monkey? My “finished” first drafts are shapeless and messy and rough, and even if I step back and squint, I can’t always tell what they’re supposed to be.

 

Honestly, those lumpy first drafts started to make me feel bad. What part of my process wasn’t working; why couldn’t I shape my clay? Until I realized that I had it all wrong: The first draft isn’t supposed to be fully formed. It’s not a sculpture, at least not yet. The first draft IS the clay.

 

Realizing that my raw materials actually might be my earliest drafts was a light-bulb moment. I was doing it right by simply mixing up some words, and once I had them together, in their lumpy, messy, slippery glory, I could start the real story-sculpting.

 

"I can smash it and start over" by Rebecca Behrens

“I can smash it and start over”


Writing became an easier process once I gave myself permission to mound and mash my ideas, once I stopped expecting them to keep a certain shape. First-drafting stopped feeling so much like hard work—and a little more like an afternoon spent playing with a jar of modeling clay. If I don’t like what I’ve made, I can smash it and start over. (Just don’t let it dry out—either Play-Doh or a draft.) Story-sculpting went back to being fun.

 

So take heart if, at the end of your first drafts, you’re still not sure exactly what you’ve made. If your work is rough and your fingerprints are still all over it. If you’ve crafted a tower, but it’s leaning like it’s in Pisa. The real sculpting of your story—revision—is still to come. But now you have all the first-draft clay you need you need to make it.