In last week’s Book Club post, we talked about getting started, recommending journaling and memory work for writers at the very beginning stages of writing.

Now you’ve done it. You’re off on a creative journey. You’re doomed.

To outsiders, writing seems easy. You make up a story in your head, you type awhile, and boom. Instant fame. If any of these people actually take up writing, they are shocked to learn this is not how it works.

As beginners, we often don’t know how to start the real writing, the part that comes after journaling. If Step 1 is memory work, what is Step 2? We may dream of writing novels, but that seems like a big leap. Short stories or creative non-fiction provide a more natural progression. If you’ve done your homework, digging diligently into your past and your family history, you have likely found some interesting characters or intriguing scenarios that could be used as the basis for a story. You might even have uncovered something with a natural beginning, middle, and end.

Perhaps you remembered how your neighbors kept their dog chained outside, even in the worst of winter, and never let him outside a ten-foot radius, even on a leash. You might have noticed that their daughters were similarly kept reined in. You might remember the woman at church who stood up to confess that her first child had been conceived out of wedlock, prompting two others to make the same admission during the same meeting, and wonder how that knowledge affected their daughters. You remember feeling more like family to your older sister’s friends than you did among your siblings and parents. You remember your brother’s high school friend who years later murdered his father, in the house five doors down. You remember the restaurant with the funny name and how your mom talked about it like it was a biker bar, only to learn as an adult it was just a steakhouse that served alcohol, and you wonder how else she used mistruth to frighten or control you.

You dig up some stuff. You explore. You find stories.

School Lunch

On Saturday, I shared a creative exercise from Lynda Barry, who suggested writing down what you remember about cars. In Bird by Bird, Lamott does something similar with school lunches. She tells her beginning writing students to write down everything they remember about school lunch – what they ate, who made it, how it compared to other kids’ lunches. She suggests there was an acceptable range of content for school lunches, with too much deviation suspect and likely to place a target on the child eating it.

If I were writing about school lunch, I’d write about the kids who brought room temperature lunch that sat in their lockers all day and the kids whose moms packed a thermos with hot food or Tupperware – usually girls, who presumably could be trusted to bring them home intact – and the kids who carried lunch in paper sacks and those who had lunchboxes and which lunchboxes were acceptable for boys and girls. I’d write about the kids who got to buy hot lunch and how we were eaten up with jealousy on pizza day, and how we felt sad for the children who got free breakfast or lunch. I’d write about how the kids divvied themselves up and which boys had competition for the seat on either side of them and which was surrounded by empty chairs, and about how these unplanned elementary school arrangements became intentional in middle and high school.

Now you may have a character in mind. A child whose parents married under the duress of an unplanned pregnancy, who eats school breakfast alone in the cafeteria and sits by himself at lunch because the other kids worry that poverty is contagious. There’s a dog chained in a yard at a house along his walk home.

But how do you get this down on paper? Once you’ve made a good effort at Step 1, once you’ve primed the pump, what is Step 2?

Short Assignments

The answer is, you start to write. It doesn’t matter where. Rarely will you begin any story by writing the actual first line. Start by describing your main character and their family and friends. Describe the dog and its house and the sound the chain made dragging in the dirt and the odor of shit that was never raked up or buried and his matted fur and how happy he was when anyone came to talk to him and how heartbreaking that was. You don’t have to start at the beginning and you don’t have to write in order. If you know how your story ends, start there and work backwards. Write snippets of dialogue and arrange them in approximate order, given what you know about your story.

Anne Lamott calls these Short Assignments. You cannot write an entire story at once, but you can write the next sentence. You can describe one character or their bedroom, and then move on to the next assignment. If you have difficultly deciding even that, Lamott suggests viewing your story through a one-inch picture frame. Describe what you can see in that frame: the woods, a doghouse, a vegetable garden, a front porch. Pick one element – the aromas, the weather, the accents – and write that down. Did you write a paragraph today? Yay! Go you. Only the rarest of writers – whom we all resent – can write a great story in one or two sittings. The rest of us craft them page by page, paragraph by paragraph, word by word. Get it down and then you can worry about rearranging.

Perfectionism

It’s very important to remember that none of this needs to be perfect, not yet, not ever. It’s ok to jump around and leave big gaping white spaces in your manuscript as you draft. When I’m stuck, I’ll type in what I need to figure out and leave a big blank space between where I left off and where I’m ready to start again.

  • Need more conflict.
  • Pace this better.
  • Set tone, vivid description.

If I need to research something specific – like a car model or a gun small enough to fit into a pocket – I’ll type what I need in context, then bold it and highlight it in yellow so I remember to go back and research it when I need a break from writing.

Many writers say you should never stop writing to start researching, but I frequently do this and that’s ok. It works for me. Once I get past the brainstorming and rough outline phase, I need a strong visual for my characters. If I don’t know what kind of knife someone wields – and if it’s important for character or mood – I will stop and find what I need. Other writers believe this breaks your flow of writing, but my brain gets stuck on these kinds of details and it won’t move forward until I figure it out. It’s probably better if you don’t stop writing to engage in research, but if you do, you do. There are no rules except the rules that work for you.

Shitty First Drafts

When you leave blanks in your story page or have big bold elements that you need to research, the result will be the Shitty First Draft. Even without blank spots, you are usually left with an SFD. A lot of people don’t like Lamott’s theory of the Shitty First Draft, because they interpret her advice as recommending that you knowingly write something terrible that you intend to fix later or that it’s impossible to write a Good First Draft. That’s not the point. You should always write to the best of your ability. Never save the good stuff for later. As with the writing habit, you can train your brain to get to the good stuff faster, to recognize when dialogue is phony or conflict feels forced. When something lyrical or a good observation comes to mind, get it down. Fast. You might even arrive at a GFD.

No, the Shitty First Draft is an acknowledgement that creation is an imperfect process. Few of us get it right the first time. When we feel overwhelmed or when the nag in our thoughts tells us that we and our writing suck, the SFD is a method for powering through. Get it down. Much of what you write will, in fact, not be shitty, even if the draft as a whole needs a lot of work. You will find gold in the sewage.

For beginning writers especially, the SFD is a strong path to starting and finishing a story. A first draft is an accomplishment. It’s further than most people get. You have progressed from wanting to write to having written. You have something to share with trusted friends. You can discuss what you want to do with your story and where you want to take it and ask for comments on how close you’ve come and what’s missing. It’s a good feeling. It’s addictive.

The SFD is also a great weapon against perfectionism. Writers are an insecure lot. Batman would have a field day with us. We may approach writing with the mistaken idea that the stories in our heads will flow out of our fingers the instant we sit down to write. Beginning writers might not realize how many drafts a story may need before it’s finished, when the answer is unknowable, but somewhere between two and 745. We may stew and fret over finding the exact right word or the perfect phrasing, to the extent that we’re lucky to finish even a sentence or two. And when the first draft doesn’t make fast friends at our writing group, we may feel like we’d rather curl up and die than go back to our laptops.

It’s ok to write badly, either as a beginning writer or in the first draft of your 100th story. Too many of us think of our first drafts as meticulous oil paintings indistinguishable from photographs, when instead we should aim for a finger painting. As you learn your craft, your first drafts will fall somewhere in the middle – messy but recognizable portraits. Until then, get busy and don’t aim for perfection.

Polaroids

If fingerpainting sounds a bit condescending to you, Lamott also refers to first drafts as Polaroids. For those not old enough to remember, Polaroid cameras printed photos instantaneously from the camera itself, on film that slowly developed when exposed to air. The picture clarified somewhat uniformly, but slowly. After a minute or two you might see the broad strokes of your image, whether it would become a group of people or a house or a mountain range. A bit longer, and you could make out some details. You might be able to tell whose photo was taken, but not the details of their clothing. Colors weren’t yet correct and the backgrounds weren’t clear. A few minutes more, and you knew what you had. You could see whose eyes had been closed or if you accidentally cut off the rear of the car or if the sun had come from behind the clouds at the exact wrong moment and ruined your shot.

Drafts are like that. Your first draft may be unclear. You might have an idea of your characters or their setting and the broader theme you want to reach, but lack sufficient detail. But as you work, your theme may deepen, as the colors on the Polaroid film get richer as time passes. As you continue writing and revising, your story clarifies and you know what you have. It might not be the exact portrait you envisioned, but it is what you created. In your second draft, you make sure everyone’s eyes are open for the picture and that you’ve correctly framed the car.

Book Club: Bird by Bird
Introduction
Getting Started