On Writing First Drafts

How to Tell Your Novel's Story to Yourself

I officially started the first draft of my novel, You Will Survive This, on June 1, 2021. Six drafts and twenty months later, my agent and I submitted the book to publishers. Today, we’re breaking down my drafting process and some writing practices that might help you streamline your own drafting process.

The Pitch

For context, here’s the latest pitch for my novel:

YOU WILL SURVIVE THIS follows Izzy Hayes, a Black folklore anthropologist in Seoul who falls in love with a thousand-year-old man. It is a story about love, loss, and living forever.

A lonely expat, Izzy spends her days studying Korean folklore and isolating herself from the world around her. While touring an art museum, she meets Kim Taejong, a strange, wildly wealthy man who takes a special interest in her work. Taejong flies Izzy out to Jeju Island for a research trip, and they stumble across a woman from his past. In an act of violence, Blanche—a survivor of Taejong’s former cult—reveals his secret: he’s spent the last thousand years cursed with immortality. Back in Seoul, Izzy agrees to help Taejong find a cure for immortality using her folklore research. But when she finds something that might actually work, she must choose between spending her life with the man she loves and giving his long life a well-deserved end. Alternating between the perspectives of Izzy, Taejong, and Blanche, the story complicates as Taejong wants to find peace in a permanent death immediately, Izzy wants him to stay alive for the remainder of her lifetime, and Blanche wants to kill Taejong to take his eternal life for herself.

Using immortality as a lens to explore love, loss, and what it means to be alive, YOU WILL SURVIVE THIS has the magical realism of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, the dynamic setting of Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face, and the tone and style of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus.

Want to learn how to write a concise pitch for your own novel?

Check out my post on how to write a query letter.

Draft 1

My writing desk on the first day of drafting YWST, originally titled Cheonjimun.

Stats

• Goal: Write a 50,000-word first draft

• Schedule: 30 days, 1667 words per day

• Timeline: June 1, 2021 to June 25, 2021

• Audience: Myself and only myself

Process

I started the first draft of YWST in June 2021, but it’s important to mention that I first got the idea for the book in December 2018. At the time, I was touring the Yun Hyong-keun Retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Amid the paintings in Yun’s The Gate of Heaven and Earth series, I stood before Umber-Blue (1976), and the opening scene of the novel, the moment when Izzy and Taejong first meet, came to me in an instant, complete and fully formed. When I sat down to write the scene a few weeks later, it flowed so easily that it didn’t feel like writing; it felt like taking dictation. 

At the beginning, the early drafts of the story centered around the movement of this painting and its meaning to the main characters. For this reason, the novel was originally titled, 천지문 (Cheonjimun), a portmanteau of the words heaven, earth, and gate, which was ultimately translated to English as The Gate of Heaven and Earth.

Umber-Blue (1976) by Yun Hyong-keun

The museum description for Yun’s The Gate of Heaven and Earth series

However, at the time, I was still working on another book, so I couldn’t fully dive into YWST yet. But between December 2018 and January 2021, I wrote the first 30 pages of the book. By May 2021, I had just graduated from my MFA program, and I was ready to start YWST in earnest. While I was finishing up my MFA, I signed an MOU with a hagwon in Korea to start teaching in November, and I had saved up enough money that I could afford to be unemployed for the next six months. I knew that this could possibly be the last time in my life that I could write “full-time” (read: be comfortably unemployed), so I wanted to use my time wisely.

I decided to write the first draft of my novel NaNoWriMo-style during the month of June, workshop the first forty pages at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in July, and revise to turn the draft in to my agent by early November.

In the end, I finished my first draft as planned in June.

Here’s a list of what worked for me and what I wish I’d done differently while working on this draft.

What Worked

• Fast drafting

• Not editing as I wrote

  • If self-editing is counterproductive to your writing process, check out this post for tips on how to stop editing as you write. 

• Doing a 3-2-3 work day

  • Three hours writing in the morning

  • Two hours reading during lunch

  • Three hours writing in the late afternoon

Again, I want to acknowledge the fact that this work schedule was a privilege because I could afford to be unemployed. But I bring up this schedule because if you ever have unstructured writing time from a fellowship, residency, or your own savings, I recommend using this schedule to stay productive. I treated writing like a full-time job, working eight hours a day. I also scheduled my reading time to both recharge my brain and inspire me for the second writing session.

While working on my first draft, I read Severance by Ling Ma and A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua. Both books are absolutely brilliant. Severance is excellent if you’re interested in world building or a non-linear structure. A River of Stars is perfect if you’re looking for an example of plot-driven literary fiction.

What I Wish I’d Done Differently

• Wrote the pitch letter before drafting

  • For more on the logic behind this practice, check out my post on what I wish I knew before querying agents.

• Outlined before drafting

  • At the time, I still mostly identified as a discovery writer, but I struggled a lot with the second act while I was drafting. I ended up having to stop, study craft, and outline anyway. I just wish I had done that from the jump.

Now that my book is officially on sub, I’ll be diving into best practices for revision and how those practices change draft to draft. Next week, we’ll talk about strategies for writing a second draft.

How do you approach writing a first draft? What writing rituals help you have a productive writing session? Let’s share our writing practices in the comments:

Until next week,

Kat