First draft of a long piece of writing is like sketching. You don’t really know where things belong yet. All you know is they need to be there. You start with a few ideas, and you put them on the page. But working out if they’re on the right part of the page, are the right size, and what colours, or medium to use, is still to be determined.

For me, putting it on the page in a first draft is how those things get worked out. It’s only when the ideas land on the page that I can test them. While they’re in my head, theoretically, anything could work. It’s only when I slap them down that I find out that some ideas don’t, in fact, work at all. And others, probably those to which you gave little credence, might come into their own with a bit of room to move on a blank sheet.

From a relatively uninspiring and minor idea can spring some weighty and story-changing stuff. That is, it won’t be the idea itself, but the places to which the idea pointed, leading you to your way, and to the place you eventually end up.

Writing the first draft – sketching – is the only way I can make headway into a story. I write to find out what the story is. I write in order to allow the story to reveal itself. Because things happen when I write. The writing itself is generative. I’m not really sure how ideas make their way into my head, but the surprising, and utterly delightful element of this is that so many times (not always, of course), something I have written that seems to have no real purpose, will be made purposeful by the next creative addition to the story. The only way I can describe it is as serendipitous.

And because the first draft is just sketching, bad decisions, omissions and continuity problems are par for the course. The thing I find most difficult to do is to leave it all behind and keep on forging ahead with the story. The story is because of these issues, very disjointed, but to go back and make the previous chapters better doesn’t really solve the issue of the first draft being imperfect.

A first draft has to be imperfect. For me, writing the first draft is how I uncover the story. As yet, I don’t know how it will pan out. I don’t know how it will end. I go forward with a loose notion of where the story should travel, according to the themes, but as far as knowing far in advance what will happen, that is not part of the process. For me, at least. Others will differ, of course. That’s what makes the creative process so fascinating in itself, from a personal viewpoint, and in the observation of others’ journeys.

So as I go forward, instead of backtracking and fixing as becomes necessary, I am leaving myself notes. Every time I realise something I just thought up needs to be featured in a major way earlier in the story, or needs foreshadowing, I make a note of it in the second draft diary.

It’s not really a diary, but yes, I have made a kind of outline of the story chapter by chapter. I write a brief outline of each chapter as I write it. And each chapter has a box underneath it for second draft notes – a dot point list of all necessary inclusions for when I get to second draft stage.

Hopefully the notes will be my roadmap as I turn the sketch into a finished piece.