The other day, during my quasi-random internet wanderings (probably on facebook, really) I stumbled upon this quote, which is attributed to Sir Terry of Pratchett.

The first daft is just you telling yourself the story.

At first blush, this seems just another empty, insipid bit of pop-inspirational drivel – like most of what so many people circulate around the internet. But Sir Terry is one of the wisest and most insightful people to have put words to page over the last two centuries. Sir Terry wrote 41 novels in the Discworld series, 39 of which provide deeply cutting satire and an incisive examination of various aspects of Western society that the vast majority of people take for granted as “just the way things are” (all while simultaneously being absolutely hilarious and charming and lovely), and 2 of which were hamstrung to varying degrees by his dementia and, in the case of the final novel, by having been completed by someone who was not Sir Terry (which in no way tarnishes his legacy). Sir Terry doesn’t do drivel. Sir Terry doesn’t do insipid. If Terry Pratchett said a thing, then it is worth considering that thing, and so I did. And it changed how I think about writing in a pretty fundamental way.

You see, I’ve always been very much a plotting sort of writer. I love me an outline. This is something that’s true of many writers, and in particular of full-time professional writers (something that I still aspire to become). If you are writing for a living, you need to be organized and focused. You don’t have time to faff around for months hammering out a sloppy mess of a first draft, most of which you’ll have to throw away anyway, right? You need to know where you’re going, and you need to get there in a reasonably efficient manner. Pantsing your way through a first draft might possibly be fun and interesting and whatever, but it is not efficient. Outlining gets you there faster and more easily.

I’m fond of saying that everyone outlines, it’s just that some people do it differently. Plotters outline by using bullet lists or the snowflake method or various other tools to cut through the cruft and get to the meat of their story quickly so that they can get down to the business of actually writing that story as quickly as possible. Pantsers also outline, but they do this by wandering their way through hundreds of pages of prose. A plotter’s outline looks like the skeleton of a story, a pantser’s outline looks like a story. But it isn’t a story – not yet – it’s just an outline that’s shaped like story. I mean, I’ve always felt that by building a well-thought-out outline before starting my first draft, I was even taking care of a lot of the work that a first draft is supposed to accomplish. Effectively, my outlined first draft should be the equivalent of a pantser’s second or third draft, right?

But that’s not what an outline does.

An outline doesn’t remove the need for a first draft, because the first draft is just you telling yourself the story, and an outline doesn’t tell you the story. An outline just shows you the shape of the story. Outlining might help you produce a more focused and cohesive first draft, but at the end of the day, both the plotters and the pantser’s first drafts are doing the same job.

One analogy I quite like for this is a sculpting analogy. I’m skeptical of those (like Stephen King) who claim that their stories already exist in the universe and that the job of the writer is to uncover them, to dig them up from the dirt of the ether and present them to the world, but I find this sculpting analogy compelling. It goes like this: the first draft is the writer gathering the raw materials, the marble or whatever that will become the sculpture. Once the materials are gathered, the writer’s job, to paraphrase Michelangelo, is to chip away all the parts that aren’t the story.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be sticking to my outlining and my planning. I find it gives me a much better idea of which parts of the first draft are the story and which ones aren’t. Pantsing gets you your block of marble, but plotting gets you a statue-shaped block of marble and I’d rather start that much closer to where I’m trying to go. Going forward, though, I probably won’t spend nearly as much time nailing down the details in the outline. The level of detail I have historically put into my outlines is largely a waste of time, because the outline is not the place where I should be telling myself the story. That’s what the first draft is for.