The Importance of Momentum, or, What To Do With Garbage

    I started a new project last week. If you've been following my blog, you might have seen the Landsong word-counter on the "My Books" page rising over the last nine days or so, and therefore are aware that it shot from "In Planning Stage" to "14K words" in under two days, then further grew to its current 22K+ words over the course of the rest of the week.

    I attribute a lot of this sudden progress to the fact that last week was my Spring Break (and as such am eager to find out what happens when this semester ends and all I have to worry about is work and dance and youth camp and so on).

    At the same time, though, I attribute a good deal of that progress to momentum.

    Once I got going, the law of inertia said I wasn't going to stop for a while--and I didn't. It was only when I got a really solid night's sleep that the torrent of words slowed down, and even still, I didn't start playing Stardew Valley to recharge my batteries until the beginning of this week.

    So how do you build momentum? How do you keep yourself going on a writing project, especially when you're writing the first draft and you know it's crappy garbage and you desperately want to go back and fix it?

    Allow me to share some of my observations.

    The current, partial draft of Landsong is filled with problems--the characterization makes no sense and has no cohesion, the romance "sub"plot is stilted and unnatural, the worldbuilding is mostly vague, the plot is full of holes, the foreshadowing for future events is almost nonexistent, entire passages are now obsolete in light of recent information about how the magic system of this world works, and so on. This is, shall we say, a garbage draft.

    True, it's a garbage draft with potential, which is more than I can say about a lot of the projects I begin (and never finish), but it's still a garbage draft, and I want to go back and fix stuff so bad!

    However, I have learned one important lesson from a lot of experience with abandoned drafts. If I go back and fix it now, all my forward progress on it will come to a complete halt. I won't just hit the point of I Don't Know What Happens Next, I'll reach the point where I've decided the draft is hopeless because Look At All These Problems And How Am I Supposed To Fix Them?! Plus, going backwards now is definitely going to mess with my momentum.

    See, momentum only works in one direction. As soon as you replace forward momentum with backward momentum, you start going backward--not forward. I know that sounds obvious when you think of it in terms of a car (when you're in reverse, you can't drive forward), but I also know that I, for one, haven't usually thought of it this way in terms of writing.

    Part of this is that there is such a thing as "Rolling Revisions", which Patricia Wrede has several excellent essays about on her blog (see the left sidebar, under "My Favorite Blogs"). This is, essentially, where you go back a few pages and reread the most recent section of the story to get back into its flow, and doing a few small edits as you go. This is generally a pretty good thing, and it is what I would call my actions in order to justify them.

    However, what I would actually do if I went back would be to go straight back to the beginning and start fixing stuff, because there's problems from the very first page! That is not a rolling revision--that's a full restart, with an inexperienced driver, in a manual transmission car, on a really steep hill!

    (Sidenote: If you don't drive stick, that analogy won't make much sense, but I do drive stick, and let me tell you that in those conditions, that car is going to roll backward. I know because I used to be an inexperienced stick-shift driver, and I did roll down a few hills early on. It was always in controlled conditions, I promise! But I'm still absolutely terrified when other people come to a stop too close behind me, because if I roll back and hit them, I'm the one who gets the ticket, whether they were tailgating me or not.)

    Going back to the beginning to fix things is a recipe for failure. I've failed that way a lot, and it's taught me not to go back to the beginning of a draft until I've reached the end of that draft. There's a chance that none of what's in this blog post will work for you, but I have learned that I have to keep up my momentum. That means no stopping on hills--and in this case, every path is a hill. I can slow down greatly, sure, and that's what's happened with Landsong since I exhausted my brain; but if my tires stop turning, or worse, start rolling backward, I'm toast. The project will hit the backburner for a very long time, until I pull the idea out again, dust it off, and recycle it into something new.

    So, yeah. When you're working on a first draft... just ignore the problems. You can fix all that later. It doesn't matter if your first draft is garbage, because it's meant to be garbage. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of good and great books out there were scavenged out of a pile of garbage first-draft, cleaned up, and built into something new that works a lot better. (To follow this analogy to the very end, look up the picture book, The Junkyard Wonders, by Patricia Polacco. It's a great book, and comes from a true story from the author's childhood.)

    It's okay if your writing all seems like crap right now. It is crap! But that's okay, because you'll fix it.

    Later.

    Right now, your job is to get that first draft done. Tie up the plot, get your characters where you want them to be by the end of the story. Chuck the thing in a lockbox (or simply a Do-Not-Open folder) and leave it there for a couple weeks to let your brain cool down on it. Then you can take it out, dust it off, and go through it again with a critical eye.

    And when you do go through it again with the critical eye, note both the bad and the good so you don't get frustrated with yourself and summarily scrap the thing. Let yourself see its potential. Every heap of garbage has potential; all we have to do is work with it to help it fulfill that potential. The picture book taught me that. :)

    But whatever you do, try to avoid losing your momentum on your first drafts. If your brain works like mine, you'll have a lot more success if you can keep moving forward and ignore the garbage until later.

    That's all for today!

    Good luck on your writing ventures! :)