It’s an old piece, and was probably my first real stab at serious novel-length prose after having written mostly short comedic fiction and spec scripts up to that point.  But it’s dreadful in a good way.  Which is to say, it’s a lot of fun to see all the mistakes and awkwardness of a first draft, especially one in which I was just “getting my legs” in a new format.

We like to dismiss them, but as bad as they always are (and must be), first drafts are awesome.  They’re hastily written and chock full of mismatched tenses and missing punctuation and godawful syntax, but they have the fire and mojo of a fresh concept trying to get out.  They still contain bits of genius and unexplored characters and honest if clumsy dialogue.  Even when we abandon them, we shouldn’t ever get rid of them for good.  They’re learning tools, mines for reusable raw materials, and object lessons in the craft.

Whenever writing something, I try to follow Heinlein’s edict of “you must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order,” and get everything down on paper/screen that I can before so much as auto-correcting a single typo.  If I don’t get it all out of my brain first, I’ll start nitpicking and changing and trying to make things letter-perfect before the story is even told, which results in a boring, suck-ass story with good structure and grammar.  I’d rather have it the other way around to begin with.

So it’s with that in mind that I’m re-reading the old shitty manuscript, and finding that for as rotten as it is, it was a great story that never saw the light of day.  It has a character that I really, really like.  There are a couple of sub-plots in it that I enjoyed, and want to graft onto another story.  And I’m thinking of posting it to the blog in a new section, as well as a ton of other first drafts and bits of incomplete stories.  Why shouldn’t my first draft mine be open to anyone else with a pickaxe?  Personally I like seeing other people’s rough work, and maybe going through my dreck will be interesting and/or helpful to someone.

Thoughts?