Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned That The First Draft Isn’t Always Shit.

This weekend I did something that a part of me believed I never would, or even could.

I finished the first draft of a novel.

I’ve been working on this thing for the last four years. I’ve struggled through NaNoWriMos, both official and unofficial; I let it languish at the back of my hard drive for months on end; I finally decided to pick up a fountain pen and start writing the damn thing by hand, just to try and keep up some momentum.

And last night, I finally got to write what might be the two most beautiful words of the whole story:

THE END.

Of course, to use a terribly clichéd turn of phrase, it isn’t really the end at all. It’s a beginning. For starters, the 25,000 or so words that I’ve written longhand need to be typed up and added to the 50,000 so so I’ve already got on Scrivener. After that there’ll be a lot of editing: dialogue to punch up, darlings to kill, extra scenes to add in. Next I’ll let some beta readers loose on it, and their feedback will undoubtedly show me a hunderd more places in which it can be improved. But eventually, some way down the line, I will have a finished manuscript. Then it’ll be time to start shopping around for agents and publishers and editors (oh, my!).

But that’s all in the far future. For now, I have a first draft. And though I’ve always been a fan of Ernest Hemingway’s assertion that “the first draft of everything is shit,” I’m both delighted and dismayed to find that the first draft I’ve ended up with is actually quite good. Not perfect, not by any stretch, but a solid foundation on which to build.

I can’t wait to see where it goes next. And if you ask very, very nicely, maybe I’ll let you have a sneak peek.

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