Lies I Told Myself While Writing My First Draft

I recently finished the first draft of my novel, a first draft that took me almost three years to write, and as I’ve immerse myself in the revising stage, it’s occurred to me how many wrong turns I made along the way.

There was a certain amount of naivety I had through this process. Despite having heard that writing a novel can be like wrestling an octopus, I still was convinced I could plan and think my way through it—which was simply not true.

Instead, writing a first draft felt more like telling myself one lie and after another as I stumbled along.

Here are some of the lies I told myself over the course of writing the first draft of my novel:

When I first started drafting, the only thing I knew for sure is that I wanted to write about this character—a young woman struggling to come of age.

But I didn’t know what to do with her, so I thought up a plot. A really cool one with a dystopian civilization, a commune, lost love, danger, some sinister characters.

In my head, it had everything. On the page it fell flat.

Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t the plot—it was that I didn’t understand the character inside it. I was trying to build a story around her instead of from within her.

After my plot died on the page, I really had to ask myself why I wanted to write this novel to begin with. I kept coming back to my character—this young woman whose story felt urgent, though I didn’t know why or even what that story was.

So I went all in on character writing. I wrote everything: her childhood, her relationship with her mother, her friendships, her losses. I switched fully into discovery writing and spent months—honestly, more than a year—getting to know her.

At the end of the year, I knew everything about my character. She felt fully formed.

But I still didn’t have a story. Knowing a character deeply isn’t the same as putting them into motion.

Because I had spent so much time exploring my character—chapter and chapters—I thought that was her story.

I wasn’t completely delusional. I knew a lot of it was discovery writing and knew I had to cut much of it, but I was still convinced some of it was important to have on the page.

So I started to cut. I cut the story I wrote about her mother, I cut a lot of the scenes from her childhood. I cut so much that I was sure—so sure—that I finally had uncovered the real story.

Until I wrote the ending.

As soon as I wrote the ending, the story came into focus and I realized that once again, a lot of the backstory I thought was essential was not. Interesting, but not the story.

I think I went into writing a novel believing there was a single, true version of this story—something I just had to uncover. Like memoir. And I thought if I made the wrong choice about plot, backstory, or POV, I’d ruin it.

But what I found instead, is that this belief was limiting.

Instead, I was surprised to find out just how much I could change: the characters’ backstories, minor characters, the pov, events, even the shape of the narrative itself.

The story didn’t break when I changed things—it got better.

The biggest lie of all? I thought for sure that I would write a certain kind of story. Even when the time and place changed, I still thought I was writing the same kind of story.

What I found was that my story had other plans. The story emerged despite my best efforts to control it, and it wasn’t the story I had so carefully planned for.

In fact, the more I tried to control it, the more it fell flat. But the more I let it shift, surprise me, and even contradict my original intentions, the more alive it felt.

Writing the first draft of my novel took me nearly three years, and for a long time, I thought that meant I was doing it wrong. I thought these missteps meant I didn’t know what I was doing (okay, well, I didn’t). But I think it was the only way I could have learned. Those wrong turns were the process and each “lie” got me a little closer to understanding what the story actually needed. Writing a novel isn’t about getting it right—it’s about staying in the work long enough to see where you’re wrong.

I would love to hear about your current projects and where you are in the process of writing them. Drop a comment to connect ⬇

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