The First Draft

What makes a good first draft of a novel? The key essential: completion. Until you finish the first draft, you don’t have a novel. Let’s rewind…

Hubble, Bubble

What goes into the draft of a novel? The spark of an idea? A story premise? A plot? Some characters? A setting?

If it’s true that humans are hard-wired for stories, then a little of all of those ingredients. Plus or minus some eye of newt and wing of bat… But how do you turn that into a finished first draft?

Take my Order

Inspiration comes in many forms, and it really doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, or the order in which you flesh it out. But here’s mine.

Compelling Characters

Without a compelling and relatable protagonist, the reader has no incentive to invest in your story. My stories are always character first. Hero, villain, anti-hero; male, female, young, old. It doesn’t matter. It has to be someone we want to root for; to walk in their shoes for the length of their journey.

Character Arc

That character journey isn’t complete without some arc of change. What’s their finishing state at the end of the story? Wisdom? Enlightenment? Self-knowledge? A sense of purpose? It can be an heroic arc or a tragic fall. But there has to be a change from their initial starting state: naiveté, ignorance, denial, pride or prejudice.

Conflict

Without conflict, there is no story. And we need both external and internal conflict to bring about the character’s arc of change.

External conflict takes the shape of plot, obstacles and antagonistic forces to bump-start the character journey.

Internal conflict is what brings them to the completion. This is the clash of values or beliefs about themselves and their place in the world.

Wants, Needs and Mis-beliefs

What the protagonist thinks they want at the beginning is not what they ultimately need at the end. The key to this discovery is often their mis-belief; something they think they know about themselves or the world that they realize is untrue. The abandonment of their misbelief brings them to a new truth. That is part of the character’s arc of change.

A hint of a plot

Plot is just a series of events that happens, in some kind of order that makes sense. I’ve argued many times there are no new plots, only new twists. You can clearly see this in story-types and genres. Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings are action adventure; Pride and Prejudice is the archetypal romance. Sherlock Holmes typifies the crime and mystery genre; Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby are World-view or Coming-of-age story-types.

Plot is not story. The mechanics of the plot, however admirable and finely-engineered, are just mechanics. Everything else we’ve listed determines why the plot matters. Writers can endlessly repeat the same plot, from Pride and Prejudice to Seven Samurai, in infinite varieties, and most of them will be instantly forgettable. Think of the thousands of romances, Westerns, detectives, and fantasies. Romantasy is the new hot ticket to replace Teen Dystopian, which replaced Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangles.

Content genre and marketing genre are mix-and-match ingredients. There are more genre mash-ups and sub-genres than ever before; new twists. Plot and genre may be key to finding an audience, but not to why the story matters.

A grounded setting

This comes way down the list for the simple reason you can move any character and any story to any setting and if those elements work, then the setting is merely frosting. It might be key to finding that genre audience, but setting rarely makes the meal. The core of Pride and Prejudice gets rewritten in every historical time period, and every in genre from Romantasy to Urban Fantasy and beyond. It’s Twilight; it’s A Court of Thorns and Roses.

The story setting, or world-building, has to be complete and convincing enough to carry the reader through the story with no breaks in the fourth wall. Whether that’s a researched location and time or a wholly invented world, there should be just enough setting to support the story. You don’t need to be Hilary Mantel or Tolkien in your depth of research, unless you really want to.

Toil and Trouble

We’ve gathered a list of ingredients, in some kind of priority order. How we mix those in the bowl is a matter of creative talent and good, old-fashioned writing craft. It all goes into the first draft. A completed story; a story that matters because of the characters and their transformation.

It will be ugly. The plot will be mis-shapen and full of holes. This first version may not even stand up. The prose will probably be terrible; clunky, shaky, cringey. Sketchy world-building will raise all kinds of questions.

Crucially, we may not fully understand the characters wants, needs, and mis-beliefs. Their goals and motivations may be unclear. The obstacles and antagonistic forces may not fit.

None of that matters in the first draft. That’s kind of the point. And that brings us full circle. It’s a completed first draft of a story idea transformed into a real physical thing. You can work it like an iron ingot in the forge, crafting a thing of shape and beauty and meaning from unfinished raw material. That’s the value of the first draft.