𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐏𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐊 𝐀𝐂𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐀 | creative writing

𝑻𝑯𝑬𝑹𝑬'𝑺 𝑵𝑶 𝑩𝑶𝑶𝑲 𝑾𝑰𝑻𝑯𝑶𝑼𝑻 𝑨 𝑭𝑰𝑹𝑺𝑻 𝑫𝑹𝑨𝑭𝑻

Oh, so you want to write a book. Well, good luck with trying to climb a mountain of self doubt, spell checking every sentence, making sure everything is perfect and that you're using the bougiest words you know. That's essentially why most of us, dark academia lovers, never managed to finish a novel before.

I'm not saying that finishing a first draft is easy by any means, it's hard work. Lots of sweat, tears and empty cups. Believe me, I am one of those who don't finish what they start too, don't feel attacked. After extensive research, I can say: that's not how first drafts get written, especially dark academia novels. Not that I managed to ever finish writing a book before, but here's an educated guess. I bet every single dark secret inside my twisted author's mind, that even Donna Tartt's The Secret History started with a somewhat shitty draft.

We are perfectionists by nature. We need to get it done in the best way possible on our first try. I cannot stand to write something less than perfect, something that doesn't feel intrinsically intellectual - and that, my dearest, is why I have never, ever, managed to reach even a quarter of NaNoWriMo. How can I achieve a challenge of writing 1,667 words per day, if I spend more than three hours merely looking at the Thesaurus?

Even now during quarentine, my schedule is a bit tight and I have to be mindful with how much time I take doing what I have to do. You see, I am a slow writer. I love to take my time savouring my words and appreciating the result. I have horrible habits that don't match at all with my schedule. If I don't know how to write a word, I always stop what I'm writing, Google it, and get lost in the web. If I always stop what I'm writing to look for how many ways I can write "said sarcastically", I can assure you that I won't get any writing done for the rest of the day. That's just how things work around here.

Look, Stephen King's advice for adverbs is great, but it's an advice for the process of editing a book. It's not an advice for a first draft. I honestly agree that we should use specific verbs instead of several words, but it definitely has never helped me finish a first draft in my entire life. I'm too pretentious to let myself make an honest mistake and move on, when I can spend way too much time choosing the perfect word.

First drafts are not written with perfect verbs. They are written with several mistakes, awfully constructed paragraphs, overly complicated sentences, and adverbs. A lot of adverbs.

I reckon that there might be exceptions. Maybe you can finish a first draft without taking 10 years and while being a perfectionist, nitpicky writer. Who knows? Certainly not me. I never managed to do it, nor met anyone who could do it either. If you can to do it, do tell us all your secrets, please! However, us, mere mortals with a fickle nature, who get caught into whatever current interest we have and get bored too easily... Well, it's hard for us to finish a first draft.

This is not me telling you how to write your novel, but actually telling you my personal experience with writing dark academia novels. I need to tell you that your first draft is not your actual novel, it's a glimpse of what it can become. Don't measure yourself as a writer by your first draft, neither compare your first draft with another book. I need to tell you this, because I didn't know they were completely different things, and maybe you didn't know it either. I always measured the weight of my first drafts with The Great Gatsby - yes, the literary classic and my favorite book.

Published books have been through several editings, revisions, and often change a lot on the way, from the plot to the grammar, or even the aesthetic of the ddescriptions. All of them started as a first draft, raw and flawed like any start of any novel ever. We will feel the urge to fix it as we write, to rewrite the same first chapter hundreds of times - something that I, myself, did more often than not. Resist this urge. If you want to stop writing and fix something, don't. Keep going, keep writing, finish your first draft before you rewrite anything. Then, allow yourself to rewrite as much as you want.