First Draft

There was a seed of an idea in your head one morning. It took root, grew, spread until it invaded each of your thoughts. By noontime, your head is an overflowing dam of ideas, threatening to burst if no outlet was provided. So you sat at your laptop, opened up your word processor program, and started tapping keys.

You were excited. It was the best idea you had ever had and you are filled with euphoria with this release of creativity. You imagined yourself actually finally finishing a novel and getting published to editorial accolades. You began to wonder if you would do a book tour even though you aren't good at public speaking.

The words flowed easily--especially at the beginning--because the plot points and scenes had been fermenting and unfolding in your brain for hours already. All you were doing was opening up the release valve. Soon though, it turns into a Jackson Pollack-like smattering of prose and dialog. Your mind was working on overdrive, plotting out an entire novel-length story faster than you can type. You had already finished the entire narrative including snappy character dialog and quirky characters by the time you are halfway through writing the starting chapter.

You soon gave up trying to write with any eloquence, producing run on sentences with limited vocabulary and structure. There was no style to speak of. All you wanted to do was throw all your ideas on the page before it was lost in your short term memory. You congratulated yourself as thought of more and more interesting and funny ideas. You imagined a great comeback line for your character. You thought of a thrilling car chase with a unique twist. A thousand thoughts are flying through your head, creating and linking up a story that will surely take months to complete. After a while, you stopped writing altogether and just started writing down an outline of scenes in a stream of consciousness.

When were done with the outline, you resume your writing, but this time it was of a higher quality because you were focused on the craft and you had the outline, not a brain swirling with disrupting scenes.

A month went by and you kept writing every day, even if it becomes less and less everything, until one day you stop because you've lost interest, fallen out of love. Excitement in the story was gone. A few more weeks went by before you opened up that first draft again. You read through the first few chapters and are appalled. You couldn't believe you actually wrote this, thought it was good. It was uninspired and unoriginal. The dialog was flat and the situations trite. The style was pedestrian and the characters shallow. So you shelved it, only existing in a deep nested folder on your hard drive, most likely never to be seen again.

Later that day after the literary execution, you were watching a movie when a spark of synapses flickered in your head. A new seed was planted and started to grow.