In a post on Lit Hub, Susan Choi offers advice for powering through a first draft.
Choi recommends writing without stopping to edit, even when you make a major change to your story. “If you decide mid-stream that all of the characters live on the moon, they’re on the moon from now on,” she says. “Just don’t go back and spend a bunch of time, like, changing Earth to Moon in chapters one through five. Just keep going.”
Choi also notes that sometimes the first version – of a line, scene, or chapter – is the best. But sometimes the twentieth version is better. “It’s really weird and hard to account for,” she says. “There are things in Trust Exercise that I feel that I never got right, and there are things in the book that I tried multiple versions of, and finally felt like I got them right. And there are things in the book that are very much as they were when I first put them down on paper.”
“Don’t be afraid to write lots of garbage, but also don’t throw any of it away,” Choi adds. “Have a very large storage system for all that garbage, because it’s only garbage in context. It may turn out to be a treasure in some other context you haven’t discovered yet.”
