I wrote this as a pep talk for 2014 NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) West Kootenay participants. We had just experienced a massive dump of snow when I sat down at the keyboard to offer editing advice to a group of brave scribes who had attempted to write 50,000 words during the month of November, and were now working on first edit.
Look at Frosty go!
First Draft is the vague piling of snow on snow as you try to create some sort of humanoid form from a bunch of ice crystals that may or may not want to stick together. While you’re doing it your hands go numb and your feet turn to blocks of ice. Inside, there’s something hot, possibly alcoholic, waiting for you and while you know this to be your reward its call becomes increasingly urgent until you begin to forget the point of this thing you are doing. What was it you were making again? And why did you think it was important?
Revision, on the other hand, happens when the snow-thing has form and shape and some semblance of continuity and suddenly its potential to go from thing-hood to full-fledged creature-hood is clear as the suddenly-thawing nose on your face. All at once blood rushes to your extremities and in a tingling you know: a little sculpting here, perhaps some coal-like embellishments there, and you’ve got way more than a metaphor for creative process: you have a recognizable work of potential merit. With legs.
As someone with a chronic fear of First Draft, I know well the thrill of revision that comes when you read a sentence or a paragraph that’s damn good and you say to yourself: I wrote that. Which is what makes the next sentence—a little off-kilter, a little un-moulded—easier to shape. Apply that to a scene that works (say it out loud with me: “Wow, I wrote that”) and let the strength and success of it carry you into the scene that’s still a little wobbly.
Think of every revision as reinforcement: you’re packing snow into the weak spots, shaping, smoothing. Celebrate the fact that you’re already through the hardest part, which was when you were piling up the parts that might someday be your creature while freezing your fanny in the cold wind of first-draft terror. Now you’ve triumphed. You’ve earned your warm and possibly alcoholic drink, thawed your various body parts and you’re back at it with gusto (and possibly a carrot) towards a sort of Frosticus Literatus that will one day run on its own two feet yelling “catch me if you can!”
And as you move forward in the knowledge that you beat the odds of indoor alcoholic stupor in favour of creative victory in this cold and frosty world called being a WRITER, you can take solace in the knowledge that there is no metaphor you could have possibly constructed worse than this one.
