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The Truth About First Drafts

First drafts are not great quality. Some lines might be fantastic, but overall, it probably won’t be amazing. And that’s totally fine, it’s normal, it’s exactly what you want.

Our silly writer brains expect perfection on the first go for some reason?? Which makes no sense. 

They’re meant to be terrible, just thoughts spewing onto paper, really. Just get the dialogue out, get the story into a tangible, clear sequence of events that’s actually a readable story, not just an outline. You can fix it later <3

Think of it as the “zero draft” instead of the first draft. “Garbage draft” works too.

Write it out on paper with pen, or add messy notes to your documents everywhere to really reinforce the idea that there’s no pressure or expectation for perfection.

Don’t look at any of the draft as you write it until you’re done the draft. Looking back at bad writing while working on the same project can be really discouraging, so just don’t look. 

Once you finish the draft, wait a couple weeks. Long enough to distance yourself from it, so you can come back to fix it with a clear head. 

Don’t compare your first draft to published books. Ever. Those books might be on their tenth, twentieth, thirtieth draft. It’s unfair. Don’t bully yourself or your project.

Set yourself a goal, x words per day, x minutes spent writing, whatever you want. Just make sure it’s achievable. Don’t set yourself up for failure unless you’re asking for discouragement.

You got this <33 Just get that draft down. 

When you finish the draft, rewrite the whole thing, using the original draft as a reference if you like. There will almost certainly be countless details you want to change, so rewriting the story will be easier than fixing the original. 

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

Hi Mr Gaiman

As someone who's never read good omens, but is planning to start next month for a book club, what is the one sentence you'd use to describe the book? ( no spoilers please :) )

Here's a sentence from the New York Times review in 1990:

Just as Douglas Adams worked his joke to death by juxtaposing the tedious lives of ordinary people with events of cosmic significance, so Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, two former journalists, go on and on for 354 pages with their schoolboy wisecracks about Good, Evil, the Meaning of Life and people who drink Perrier.

i drew the poster but then csp crashed on me & didnt recover the poster so i used the lowest quality jpeg i could find

this has plagued my mind for Months, i drank coffee at 1am & havent come down yet

PLEASE THIS IS KILLING ME HELP

Caesar, muttering to himself: They call me caesar cause I be dressin’

Courier, hiding in the shadows and about to assassinate him:

i really wonder what Julius Caesar would think of a bunch of neurodivergent rats huddled in a circle chanting ides of march ides of march ides of march and then cheering loudly on the 2067th anniversary of his assassination?

like would he cry?

me at any given time: can we just buckle down and focus on the task at hand please???

my brain:

my brain: ……….ranibow sprimkle……………

Freddy giving advice VS Kaz giving advice

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me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash

Listen, there's no secret mankind won't one day know and perhaps regret knowing

Do you ever think you'll stop drawing fanart? No offense it just seems like the kind of thing you're supposed to grow out of. I'm just curious what your plans/goals are since it isn't exactly an art form that people take seriously.

Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.

Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.

That’s the art you mean, right?

Because in my experience, when grown men make it, nobody calls it fanart. They just call it art. And everyone takes it very seriously.