#first-draft

The reason you can do things this way is what comes next: revision. This is where you tighten up the prose, maybe get a little alpha reader feedback, figure out what larger changes will have to be affected throughout the story and start working on the big stuff.

It’s best to do the big stuff first--what’s the point in fixing prose you cut out completely later on? But tightening the prose so that it’s actually legible can kind of be done as you read it through for the first time. And I basically can’t read anyone’s prose nowadays without marking it up with changes and notes. So personally, I’m okay with that.

You repeat the process a couple of times, and you’ve got a pretty decent story. The characters are well-drawn, the world is hinted at in the background without long paragraphs of exposition, so you start sending it to beta readers.

This is where things get tricky. Beta readers tend to be writers themselves, or people in the business at least. They are more critical, with eyes like hawks and an understanding of good story structure.

And while the Alphas tended to enjoy the story thoroughly, the Betas have found glaring, overwhelming, story-crippling problems. Things you’d never even considered. Things now so obvious, you wonder how you or no one else even saw it before.

Not 100% sure I got Betas and Alphas round the right way, but you get the idea.

Welcome to First-Draft-itis

What I’ve found in reading countless stories of my fellow writers is that there is a pattern to these kinds of issues. They all tend to be logical fallacies--aspects of the plot or the world or even the characters that, on further inspection, don’t make all that much sense.

A first draft is often written based on the seed of a story, a premise, a concept, a character sketch you want to build a story around... Some of it comes from what they’ve already thought about ahead of time, but for most writers a lot of it is conceived as they write. And this is where the problem starts.

In that first draft, you’re not worrying about the implications of giant rabbits able to turn rust into gold. You don’t need to think about where they’ll get giant salads from, or how the gold-based medieval economy would collapse under the weight of rust-based exchange. It sounds cool, so you write it.

This is the right way to write a story. If you enjoy writing it, chances are it has that je ne sais quoi that will capture the reader’s attention as well, and keep them engaged.

But this style of writing leaves you vulnerable to not necessarily making sense. You’ve read the story a dozen times, revised a little each reading, taken countless notes from readers of all kinds. So how have you never noticed these glaring mistakes that underpin the whole thing?

Too Close to the Trees

The reason, of course, is that you’re in too deep. You’re not worried about the logic of it all, you’re writing a story. You’re writing a piece that imparts an emotional journey to the reader, not a historical text.

So when the Beta readers--or anyone that picks up on these kinds of things--point these things out, you may be inclined to get defensive. “That’s not what my story’s about,” or “suspension of disbelief,” or “that’s just how it is.”

It’s your right to ignore a particular note. In some cases it really isn’t an issue. Maybe you’re not writing hard-SF, but more of a campy Space Opera. “This is a surrealist comedic piece about myxomatosis, not a deconstruction of the Wall Street Crash.”

The thing is, if the basics don’t make sense with a little scrutiny, there will be plenty of people so distracted by your neglect of realism that they’ll not even see any of your carefully crafted emotion-inducing story elements.

So these harder-to-swallow comments should at least be considered. And if you decide that for the story you’re trying to tell it’s not a big enough problem to invest some time in, that’s your prerogative. You just need to spend a moment to step outside the forest to get a better view of the situation. Just make sure you’re not dismissing them out of hand just because you’ve put so much time into polishing it as it is.

Second Draft

If worse comes to worst, you may need to man up (or woman up) and write a fresh draft of the thing. This has two benefits:

For larger problems, it’s much easier to fix from scratch, from the ground up, than it is to tweak words until they make sense.

And while it sucks to have to write a whole “new” story, it can be much less daunting to rewrite something you’ve already spent time on than something completely fresh.

Just think of your first draft as further research and development!