In the book, No Plot, No Problem, author Chris Baty talks about the “pathway to genius.” This pathway to genius helps get you from idea to completed first draft. And it’s all pretty simple.
The pathway to genius is choosing a quick deadline or a daily word count that’s high enough. Soon the quick turn around or daily word count will help you finish your first draft. It does this because it forces you to:
- Lower Your Expectations–If you go into writing your novel with the mindset that it has to be perfect, chances are, you’re not going to ever get it finished. This is because you’re setting your expectations way too high.It’s good to have high expectations, but have them for the final product, not the first draft.”No one ever writes a brilliant first draft,” Baty says in his book. “This is the case no matter how talented you are, or how long you take to coax the thing into existence. Novels are simply too long and complex to nail on the first go-round.”Remember, before you can have a brilliant final product, you need to have a first draft.
- Write for Quantity Over Quality–This means worry about getting your story down on paper regardless of how “bad” it might be at first.This would force you to lower your quality bar from “‘best-seller’ to ‘would not make someone vomit,'” Baty says.Unfortunately, many writers don’t do this.”At the first awkward line of prose or botched brushstroke, we hurriedly pack away the art supplies and scamper back to our comfortable domains of proficiency,” Baty says. “Better a quitter than a failure, our subconscious reasoning goes.”
- Stop Being So Hard on Yourself–Stop being so hard on yourself. It’s as simple as that. This means no negativity and no being self-critical about your writing. Baty says you need to give yourself time “to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens.””In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable,” he says. “So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.”
