I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale near the Atlantic and the Intercoastal Waterway. Because of all the water around us, kids took swim classes early on. After each lesson, my mother took me for a chocolate milkshake, then to the beach. It was a delightful sensation to shiver through an ice cold shake under the Florida sun while gazing at the ocean. Then Mom said, “Your swim instructor says you’re not doing well.”
I mistakenly thought that alternately holding onto the side of the pool and putting one foot down to touch the bottom and moving my arms would fool the instructor into thinking I was swimming. Caught out, I realized I could only learn to swim by letting go. In the ocean, there was nothing to hold onto, and I could gradually move into deeper water at my own pace and begin dog paddling as I’d been taught. I don’t recall exactly when I started swimming, but I remember the feelings—liberation then fear.
The same often happens to writers during zero or early drafts. No matter how you plan a writing project, you’ll eventually find yourself writing what you don’t know or aren’t sure of. Exploration and discovery are both liberating and scary, but there’s no other way to get at what we’re really writing about.
One reason for the fear is that what we write rarely looks as we thought it would. Another reason is our suspicion that what we’re writing isn’t working. These are the scary parts of writing that acclaimed author William Zinser called writing to learn. He meant it in an academic sense. Here, we’re considering exploration and discovery as stages essential in learning what we’re really writing about, who we’re writing about and who we’re writing for.
At this point, we’re no longer touching the bottom of the pool. We’re in the ocean. Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we no longer see the shore.
While I don’t recommend this in swimming, being out of our depth as writers is the only way to deepen our stories, in whatever genre, and improve our writing. Even at this stage of the writing life, I find it hard to be out of my depth. But it’s still the only place where exploration and discovery happen.
One school of thought on zero and early drafts is to share them with someone knowledgeable and trustworthy, to avoid expending resources on a nonviable project. I recently chose this path with my new novel and gained two valuable insights—how the work read to a trained professional who didn’t know the story, and what I hinted at in the story but didn’t fully develop.
To maximize feedback on a zero or early draft, don’t expect perfection. Rather, embrace and examine the flaws. To paraphrase music critic, manager and record producer Jon Landau, sometimes the things that are wrong with something are the same things that make that thing great. That’s the way it is in life and that’s the way art works.
Happy writing!
Adele Annesi is an award-winning writer, editor and instructor. Her five-star cultural heritage novel is What She Takes Away (Bordighera Press, 2023). Adele coauthored and coedited Now What? The Creative Writer's Guide to Success After the MFA. Her MFA in creative writing is from Fairfield University, and her long-running blog for writers is Word for Words. Her podcast is Adele Annesi on Writing.
