Hey, thanks for reading my newsletter! There’s no paywall, and I have no plans to monetize it in the future, but if you would like to support me financially, the absolute best way is to pre-order my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Plus that way, you get a book that I’m immensely proud of, about a young witch who teaches her heartbroken mother how to do magic. It’s full of queer joy and connection and dirty magic, and it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written. There is so much gay romance and hope and grief in this book — plus it has a huge strand of dark academia, as the main character delves into the secrets of a mysterious novel from 1747. You can pre-order it anywhere, but if you want it signed, personalized and defaced with some terrible artwork, you can pre-order it from Green Apple Books in SF.
Why The “Garbage First Draft” May Not Work For You
It's early November which means one thing: a lot of people are going to try and write a novel in a month. (There may be something else going on right now, but I can’t possibly say.) I recently cut ties with the NaNoWriMo organization over their endorsement of AI, but it's still awesome for folks spend the month of November crafting a story from scratch.
But I want to give y'all permission to do two things:
Don't beat yourself up over some arbitrary daily word-count goal, because there are many types of progress.
Feel free to edit as you go, revise stuff you already wrote, and generally follow whatever process makes sense to you, in order to create the first draft that’s going to be most helpful to you. Yes, even if it takes a little longer.
I really do love the notion of an epic sprint, producing a ton of words in a matter of weeks and pushing yourself to keep moving forward with your story. I also think it's important to reassure people that your first draft doesn't need to be perfect, and in fact nobody's ever is — in fact, it really is okay if your first draft sucks in a lot of ways. You really do have the entire revision process to knock that bad boy (or girl, or whatever) into shape.
That said, just like any other good thing, these notions can be taken to an unhealthy extreme. People can get too hung up on achieving some benchmark of words per day, to the point that it becomes a source of stress and self-recrimination. And the notion that you should aim to create a “garbage first draft" isn't always helpful, for some books and some writers.
Every writer is different, and in fact no two books by the same writer are the same. I find personally that my process changes a lot depending on what I'm working on and how I'm feeling in general. And there are a lot of times when the daily word-count thing and the garbage-first-draft thing are counterproductive for me personally. I suspect I'm not the only one.
So let's take these one at a time.
1) Writing productivity isn't always measured in words per day
Someone once said, "It's not about making the word count, but about making the work count." I was pretty sure it was Nalo Hopkinson who said this, but she has denied it. In any case, whoever said this, they rule.
I used to get really mad at myself if I spent an hour or two staring into space instead of writing. And I refused to count any notes I was making, including brainstorming and trying to untangle a tricky plot issue, toward my word-count goal.
It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that staring into space is a huge part of the writing process for me. In fact, all of my best stuff comes out after a period of staring into space, because that’s when my deepest creative self becomes involved. And that sometimes when I’m unable to produce any words, I should take a long walk. Or have a dance break!
As I talk about in my book Never Say You Can't Survive, a lot of how I figure out my story is by asking myself questions and wrestling with the answers. Not to mention, I often get stuck because I'm not fully putting myself into the minds of my characters. Meaning that I haven't fully considered what they know at this point, what they want, and what they're likely to do about it.
Ironically, not only do I produce my best stuff after staring into space (or playing with my cat), but also I’m more likely to produce a large quantity of words after zoning out or brainstorming. That’s right: sometimes the best way to end up with thousands of words is to stop focusing so hard on producing thousands of words. (For me, at least.)
Does this mean I no longer obsess over how many words of fiction I've produced in a given day? Sadly, no. I still fixate on this metric way too much, because there just aren’t that many objective metrics when it comes to writing.
Plus I have days where I know what I want to write and I have it in my head, and it's just a matter of shaking myself until some words fall out. There are times when making myself crank out a lot of words in a single day really is the best use of my time — it's taken a long time for me to know when those times are, based on my own experience and my own writing process.
Anything can become a form of procrastination, including spending too much time second-guessing, staring into space and repainting your mind-palace. At a certain point, you definitely need to stop obsessing and put down some words. But — I’m gonna blow your mind here — the relentless pursuit of a daily word count goal can, in its own way, be a form of procrastination. It can be a way to feel like you’re accomplishing something, when you’re actually just spinning your wheels and going nowhere.
As a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad idea to change gears every once in a while. If you’re on a roll with writing something, then of course you should keep going as long as you can. But if you’re slowing down, or struggling, maybe just take a step and try something else. Again, take a walk. Have a dance break. Ask yourself some tough questions!
Anyway, all too often, if I force myself to produce a lot of words in a short time, I may find my story getting further and further off course, until it's going to take a lot longer to fix than it would have taken to just figure out the correct path in the first place.
Which brings me to...
2) Your first draft doesn't need to be total garbage.
I'm currently trying to finish something — it started as a novella, but I'm afraid it may have ballooned into a novel. Just last week, I hit a wall and spent a few days trying in vain to keep moving forward. I even beat myself up over the paucity of words I was producing, because I just could not get any purchase on the story.
At last, I reluctantly scrolled back in the document and found the problem: about 8,000 words earlier, there was a scene which set completely the wrong tone for a key relationship, and basically left the relationship no place to go. Without giving too many spoilers for something you might not read for a couple years, these characters had already reached a place in their relationship that they shouldn't have reached until closer to the end of the story. This literally gave them no room to grow, no space for an arc, no way build out the story.
I completely scrapped that scene and replaced it with a brand new one, and then went about revising large chunks of the following 8000 words, until they had the beginnings of a proper arc to their relationship — one that started in one place and ended in a different place. As soon as that was done, I could once again start cranking out the rest of the story moving forward.
This has happened to me many times before. I would say at least half the times that I've gotten stuck, it's been because I needed to go back and fix something earlier in the story that was still causing problems. I've also learned to trust my instinct, when I get a feeling that a story is — as Starbuck would put it — going the wrong way.
Sure, there are times when you can just pretend something different happened 8,000 words ago, and keep moving forward as if you originally wrote it the right way — with a plan to go back and fix that bit later. But when it comes to character beats and especially relationships, I often find that I need to understand where a character is at right now, which means I need to have written the scenes that get them to that place.
And some of my earliest attempts at writing a novel got messed up, in large part, due to a mistaken decision that I made and never fixed, which ended up throwing the entire rest of the draft out of whack. Speaking from experience, it's actually very hard to revise a first draft where everything is headed in the wrong direction and the basic character stuff doesn’t hold water.
I think of the first draft as being like the foundations of your house: if the foundations aren't sturdy, the rest of the house is going to be rickety as heck. And going back and redoing the foundations later can sometimes be a lot more trouble.
Even if you're writing a novel that doesn't rely so much on the choices your characters make, because it's more focused on a ticking clock or a evil conspiracy, you still might not want your garbage first draft to be too garbage. Plot holes can open up in the fabric of your story, and the longer you let them sit there, the harder they could be to remove sometimes. That said, I generally feel like what happens is harder to change than why it happens or how it happens — if you need your characters to arrive at a certain place in a certain state, you can change your mind endlessly about the exact route by which they get there. So it really does depend.
All in all, the advice to “write fast and don’t look back” does work for a lot of people — it's only when this gets elevated to a one-size-fits-all solution that it becomes a real problem. And at times, because writers are an insecure and superstitious lot, people push this advice so hard that it can feel a little bit like the theology of a particularly insular cult.
If you're like me, this advice works some of the time, but not all of the time — sometimes I need to look back at where I went wrong, and sometimes writing fewer words is actually the more productive choice.
Final thought: Don't forget to have fun and amuse yourself as much as possible. Writing really should be fun, at least some of the time. And most of all, stay the hell away from bullshit generative A.I. It’s anti-creativity, anti-humanity, and horrible for the only planet we can currently live on. Just say no, kids.
Music I Love Right Now
Like most people, I'm a little bit anxious right now. (I can't imagine why.) One thing that has been giving me life is watching Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour on Netflix.
Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that I'm a big Olivia Rodrigo fan, and but I still wasn't ready for how much I loved this concert. A big reason is because Rodrigo surrounds herself with all female musicians, plus dancers and vocalists. In an interview, she said that she was inspired by 1990s alt-rock and riot-grrl music. The effect is raucous and beautiful and an encapsulation of the future that all decent people want. Olivia Rodrigo has a cheery–but-cheeky vibe, smiling a lot and seeming to have the time of her life — but most of her songs are spiky laments about all the lackluster dudes she's hooked up with and the pressures of being a young woman in America. She sings a lot about unrealistic beauty standards and the ridiculous pressures to be perfect. My favorite moment in the concert is probably when she proclaims herself to be “American as fuck.” I hope some shitty dudes see that and have an aneurysm.
The revelation of this concert, though, is how guitar-driven her sound is: there are two guitar players on stage, plus Rodrigo plays the guitar occasionally. The result is a dense wall of wailing strings, with sharp aggressive drumming underneath. Except when Rodrigo turns full emo, when it's suddenly all piano, all the time. As you probably know, Rodrigo shares a producer with Chappell Roan, Dan Nigro, so their sounds are very similar — but watching this concert has helped me realize just how rock-influenced she really is, and how welcome that feels. I really hope her third album leans into the riot-grrl stuff, because that would be excellent. Anyway, if you're looking for a thing to do on election night instead of watching doofuses chatter about numbers without any real context, I highly recommend watching the Guts World Tour.