Some thoughts on completing the first draft of your first novel

By: Chris Murphy

Finishing the first draft of most written pieces is pretty significant, but when you're dealing with a novel-sized project the demands and the rewards are significantly larger. I always read the postings of fellow aspiring writers who completed their draft and kept wondering what this whole pay-off was about. To be quite honest, I thought I had finished my first draft. I thought I had written the ending. It turns out that I wrote AN ending, but not the ending that was appropriate for the story. A good ending, or a proper ending changes a lot of things.

I spent some time this past weekend tearing down the work I did to finish off the first book in a short series — about two-hundred pages of written material that on a second read, felt like it was just running in circles without relevance to plot, aka: Robert Jordan Syndrome (I say this with greatest respect, btw); however, it is true. The ending to my story was more of a tangent and I think by doing that I cheated myself out of a kind of gratification writers have experienced.

Though I don’t have enough experience to really say whether a good ending or an appropriate ending are the same thing — god knows there are enough debates raging about that — I do have enough experience to know that you’ll feel what is the right ending. For the most part, I feel it isn’t about getting the first draft done only to move on to the second, but rather to get the first draft done and in some form that you can feel enthusiastic about a second draft.

I will attempt to pace myself with the second draft as not to feel so burnt out by the end of it. I now have an ending that I use to help resolve some of the threads in the plot, and validate certain concepts I’ve alluded to in the story. In any case, I don’t really see too many people being altogether interested in this particular post, but I wanted to capture my experience so at least I will remember the reason I decided to pursue a writing project.

• Posted: July 30, 2007
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