I have been writing for most of my life. My earliest memory of creating fiction and reimagining the world with my pen was from sixth grade, when I wrote a short story for school retelling The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch's point of view. It was fun, but the aha! moment that I wanted to be a writer came when my teacher told me how much he enjoyed it and that I had a real knack for this writing thing. It felt great to learn I was actually good at something. I've never developed a real talent for much else. I'm not a good cook, not an athlete, never had an interest in developing a green thumb, don't have the patience for knitting, and don't get me started on my attempts to draw or paint.
Between my natural talent, my studies in the art of writing for the past fifteen years, and my well-crafted process that I still update and refine to this day, my friends and writers' community view me as some kind of authority on the matter. Or maybe they just know how much I love talking about writing and encourage it just to appease me. Either way, I get asked a lot about my process, the challenges of writing, and the joys of writing. So, I decided to give them and all of you the opportunity to ask me whatever you want about writing - and I'll answer. I'm calling it the "Ask Lennon" series.
To start the series, one of my fellow writers submitted the following question:
How do you stop yourself from going into rabbit holes so you can finish a first draft?
This is a great question, because it doesn't have just one answer. In fact, for this question, I have two.
First, the most important thing is getting that first draft finished. I think we writers get into rabbit holes, particularly during the research phase of our writing, because we crave the distraction. It eases our creative anxiety. We want our first drafts to be perfect, so perfect that our books are ready to hit the shelves the minute we exit the Word doc. That's a lot of pressure we put on ourselves and our creativity. So, we distract ourselves. We arm ourselves with more material to work with, we look at what others have created online for inspiration, we bury ourselves in research where we're comfortable. But the thing is, in all that distraction, we're missing the point. The first draft is already perfect if it just exists. That's all the first draft has to do. That's why I call it the Shitty First Draft, even in my folders on my computer. It takes the pressure off to know that the first draft is only the first draft. My novel will go through many more revisions and iterations before it's complete. So, cherish that first draft. Embrace the sloppiness, the mistakes, the poor lines or paragraphs, or messy setting and character descriptions. Remember that you can edit a shitty page, but you can't edit a blank page.
Second, when I read this question, the phrase "down the rabbit hole" got me thinking. I know its origins came from Alice in Wonderland, but I just had to look up the metaphorical meaning that stemmed from Alice's adventures and has remained in our culture for decades. According to Wikipedia, the common phrase means, "Getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange." And isn't that the joy of writing? Isn't that concept exactly why we put ourselves through the agony of character development, plot structure, or finding that perfect first line to pull the reader in? We want to get deep into something great. We want to end up somewhere strange, or at least stranger than our mediocre every day.
The first draft, or for me the "zero draft," is all about exploration. Go deeper. Drop a piano on your main character as they walk down a city street (not literally - or maybe, yeah literally). Do whatever you need to do to keep your story moving forward. The first draft is just for you, to find your story for yourself. Go deep into that rabbit hole, and go freely.
Just keep writing.
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