I am Dr. Frankenstein.
I am creating a monster (I assure you the novel, at the moment, is a beast).
I am breathing new life into the thing by cannibalizing parts of other corpses, or, what we commonly refer to as drafts.
At first I believed I’d only need four drafts to complete the creature. I’d start with its skeleton, the bones of the book that would hold it together. Then I’d add the muscle, which would strength the story and give it power. Thirdly, the skin, the covering that smoothed out the story and finally, the fashion, the style, such as figurative language and diction and imagery, which would make it its own being.
As you well know, I was wrong.
I worked on the bones. I wrote a structure that wouldn’t stand on its own, so I had to saw and cut and refigure the story. So when I say that I was on my seventh or eighth first draft, this is what I mean. I was still at the fundamental, making-it-work shape.
Advice for a first draft that I’d been given, advice that I have given, is to simply write it, no matter how bad it is. Just get words on the page. Easier to work with something than nothing. I agree. Except I didn’t realize how far off my final vision the “something” would be. In my very first first draft, finally completed after a dozen or more efforts to get started (so would that be my 11th first, first draft?) I discovered I’d created a skeleton of a creature vastly different from what I had meant to create. It resembled nothing like a story, one I could animate, one that could stand on its own.
It’s this realization that, yes, saved me from certain failure–had I put out that hideous creature, I’d surely lose all hope of success–but also frustrated me to no end. I thought I knew what I was doing!
This is when I learned to strip down my creation and use its many parts to start over.
Now I’m on the second of the four steps, the muscle. Around me, littered all over, are the remains of my earlier drafts and I now pick and choose elements from those to create a better version. I made the mistake early on in this stage to think I was already at the last step, the flourishes. To me, that’s the really fun part about writing–finding the right word, the strongest image–and I thought I’d be close to that.
Again, I was wrong. There’s a lot of work to strengthen the story, much of it new writing and new ideas. It’s taking longer than I thought.
Still ahead, smoothing it all out and finally the flourishes. By that time, I estimate a draft count–if you consider all my aborted attempts as individual drafts–of more than 20. If we follow conventional wisdom that each revision improves the book, then I should have a runaway bestseller 🙂
I thought writing was linear–write a story, revise a story, edit a story, publish a story. Only now do I realize how patchwork and circular and experimental the writing process is. I am trying to create something that has never existed before; I want to breathe new life into my story, one that can soar.
I hope, if I am Dr. Frankenstein, that the result will not be monstrous, as my creature feels now. I hope that, when I’m finished, when I succeed in presenting to you my final version, I will not have created a monster, but hatched a phoenix, one that rises from the ashes of all my old drafts.
Yes, yes, I like that metaphor much better.
Forget Frankenstein. I am Phoenix Rising.
