Wonderfully horrible first drafts

I mentioned in my last post that this month I'm away at Camp NanoWrimo. It's my very first trip to camp and I'm loving it! Things are going much better at this nano than at others. My kids are older and mostly at school all day. I've been more organized which has allowed me to become more focused and I'm not having to squeeze my writing in between Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's definitely been stress relieving.

My goal was originally to write 45000 words by the end of the month. I was hoping that would equate to somewhere between 4 and 6 short story first drafts to rewrite when the month was done.

As of this morning, I'm at 48100 words and have 4 completed first drafts. With one week left that gives me time to hit 55000 words (my new goal as of half way through the moth) and have 5 short stories to clean up and start sending in at the end of the month. And the most exciting part is that the short stories are good!

And when I say good, I mean that the writing is awful, major plot lines don't materialize sometimes until the very end of the story, characters are flat and underdeveloped and at some points, the plot doesn't really make any sense.

But the seeds are there. I've fallen in love with the potential for every one of them. Whole worlds waiting to be explored, characters dying to get out there and do their thing in a much better version in the rewrites. For at least three of the short stories, I see the potential for whole novels following after. I am coming to understand the truth of the statement that you really don't need to be a good writer. You have to be an excellent re-writer. And that's where I get to make these stories shine like they ought to.

I'm quite excited about all of this. I'm finally feeling like my dream of being a writer is phasing into an actual reality.

Before Nano started, I was working on cleaning up a short story that I wrote last year. It was originally a very short, very rushed little story with little to no character development and just about the most depressing ending you could ever imagine. A man's daughter gets killed in front of him and then he accidentally ends up ingesting and devouring her soul, essentially destroying what's left of her forever.

Horrible right?

But the rewrite is awesome. Everybody has a reason to be there. Everybody has a powerful motivation. Sadly, the girl still dies. But I manage to not make it the worst thing that could ever happen. In fact, the ending is infused with hope this time. And that's something I just couldn't see happening the first time through. Hooray for crappy first drafts and the chance to write it all over again!

If writing really is performance art for shy people, then I'm just glad that unlike the stage, we don't have to get it right the first time.

I'm planning on turning my story in to Writer's of the Future this month. Hopefully it does well. I'm realistic enough to realize that chances are astronomically against me winning the first time in. But it's a start. And it's a start with a story that I feel really good about. And that makes it real.

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