Sarah Bullen's Rules of Writing your First Draft
Sarah’s Rules of Writing Your First Draft
#1 Stick to a basic word editor.
Close down all other programs every single time you sit down to write. The only programme open must be Word (or Pages on a Mac) - no email, no Internet and definitely no Facebook. Try not to use word processing fancy packages like Scrivener they are just more distractions.
#2 Write an entire scene in a sitting.
It takes a while to get into a scene. You will fidget, move stuff around, make coffee, clean the garden, make toast, reread your notes. The good material comes once you have got this out the way. Don’t break your flow once you find it.
#3 Don’t discuss your book with anyone until your draft is finished.
Talking is not writing. Instead of telling people your stories your challenge is now to move them into the written form. This rule is also to keep your own project sacred. You will find that everyone is ‘writing a book.' Well, YOU are doing it so no need to talk about it.
#4 No self-editing or revising the previous day’s work.
This is the single most important rule that will get you to the end of your book. Don’t look back. Once you start writing, there is no re-reading your previous day’s work. Just keep moving forward until you have finished the entire first draft. Your aim is to get your word count up. You will end up changing most of it in your second draft anyway.
#5 Do not read any similar books to yours for the entire duration of your writing process.
Your book is not unique. There are millions of books out there. You are bringing your own voice and life to this age-old story. Reading other’s work is going to confuse you and make you judge your own story. You will want to write like them. Avoid this.
#6 Get clear on your book and your chapters (or scenes) before you write.
Don't start until you have (most of) your scenes roughly plotted, so you understand the arc and flow of your story.
#7 Don’t change your story.
There will come a time when you wonder why on earth you chose this story, this angle when there are so many better ones out there. Well, there are not better ones, only distractions. This is your story - tweak, refine and improve - but stick with it to the end.
#8 There is no such thing as Writers Block.
Really. That only kicks in when you have a massive advance to write your 7th novel and no ideas.
#9 There is no such thing as good or bad writing.
I can’t stress this enough. It is not the most talented writers who get published. It is the most disciplined and tenacious writers who get published. Your writing style is your own, and you will find readers who enjoy it or an editor who can clean it up later.
#10 There is nothing you can’t fix in a rewrite or second draft.
This really speaks to rule #4 - That’s why I don’t want you to edit or revise your work each time you sit down to write. Leave it for the second draft.
There is no right or wrong way to write a book.
Okay, this is not a rule really, more of an observation. I have worked with writers on so many books that sometimes I have to throw the rulebook out the window. A recent writer who got a publishing deal spent eight years writing about her adventure in Tibet. A businessman last year threw his book together in four months using an Excel spreadsheet and an assistant. Some books only come together in the editing phase, or your best idea comes once have already sent your book off to the printers.
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If there is a story inside you and you want to write it - then you are in the right place. Sarah Bullen is an international writing coach and author mentor. She has worked with writers for over a decade to help you to write a book.
I have loads of video lessons and written ones.
Find me at
www.thewritingroom.co.za/
There you can:
Join one of my online mentorships
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You may want to write a non-fiction book to expand your career, you may want to tell your own story, write a memoir or a novel. After 15 years of coaching authors, writing and editing books Sarah will guide you through the journey from the idea to publication. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa but works globally.
"Writing is a journey. Writing a book is a deep dive into a process of creativity and structure. I totally believe in planning your book and writing with intent. Sometimes it just takes some clear direction, and an understanding on how to structure a book to take you from having a dream of writing to becoming a published author. Let's walk that journey together. The writing is your job, my job is to show you how, to hold you accountable and to find your best book."
I’m shocked how many stubborn writers are in this comment section, and I cringe at the thought of them receiving actual criticism of their beloved stories. I appreciate the forthrightness and the information, Sarah. Twenty years ago, much of this remained a secret of circumstance, but information can be shared so freely now. Thank you. I don’t understand why any prospective author would be so quick to dismiss the pragmatism of an industry professional. If scrivener works for someone as a writing tool, great, but there’s a pretty obvious parenthetical around, “don’t use scrivener for your rough draft.” She’s telling us to simplify. People are out here creating mood boards and playlists and downloading multiple programs. The point is: the only thing we need to write and to write well, is whatever implement will get the words on the page. A pencil and paper is as effective for Neil Gaiman as an old computer is for GRR Martin. Everything else can easily become a distraction or excuse. “I need to do more research,” or “I need x tool to do y,” or “I can’t start until,” are all versions of the writer’s dearest friend-procrastination. Let’s not be so defensive toward our allies in the industry. If the ideas work for you and get words on the page, sew them into the fabric of your workflow. If not, discard them. Simple.
I wonder how many have published novels
Have you ever even worked with Scrivener? You certainly can show it as one long text and one of its greatest features is the no-distraction writing mode. Writing a whole book in one word document is a pain in the ass, especially when it comes to editing.
I concur. Love Scrivener. Can make it as streamlined or complicated as I like in the moment. Helps me to organize my thoughts too. Breaking down everything in individual scenes that I can move around as well as track what each scene is about in the synopsis pane and with metadata. I can understand most of her advice but the bit about initially avoiding tech like scrivener just made it seem she had little to no experience with it and only based it on what she prefers. If her preference works for her, great, but base this advice on solid real-world experience with a program (not just a trial version or reading about it). I can understand writing without distraction, though. So if that was really her point, great. But I have found I need a solid outline to keep my writing momentum even if I end up straying from it or making new discoveries about my story along the way and Scrivener makes this very easy for me. It, of course, isn’t the only way to outline or write. Just don’t want to discourage others from exploring other writing programs besides the most basic. And I think that’s what her advice does.
Lots of you are getting hung up on the "don't read in your genre while writing in that genre" rule. I think what Bullen meant was that you should avoid reading in the genre you're writing in WHILE you're writing. Makes plenty of sense to me. Whenever I'm writing a psychological thriller, the last thing I want to read is a psychological thriller. Do I really need to know how another, much more successful author, made it? No. I like to read something completely different to my writing genre as it helps keep me focused on the work at hand, instead of muddying the waters and weakening my resolve.
Some interesting tips, worth considering, but ultimately through trial and error we find what works for each of us. 😊
I love Scrivener. It was a wee bit intimidating at first because it does so much, but after that it was fantastic. It's amazing for keeping organized.
Clicked off the minute she started bashing Scrivener. Scrivener will do everything she says she wants if she would just learn how to use it that way. 🙄
I agree. To each his own. Good tips Sarah offers, nonetheless.
Loved her tips except for this one. I use the basic functionality of Scrivener to stay organized with the story structure and just write. It doesn't slow me down at all - compulsive self editing does.
Excellent advice. But, oh God, it will be tough NOT revising first chapters. Subscribed and upvoted.
OMG.....fantastic advice. So many say to keep reading.....I cant have two stories swirling around in my head at the same time. And the whole scene in one sitting.....yes yes yes. My mood can change the way i write so much. Thank you . I have just subscribed. 🎉
this is incredible advice - thank you!
I found this short video enormously helpful. I applause your brevity. For the past two weeks I’ve adhered to all ten rules. The result? I’m smoking fast through that first draft. The ‘don’t look back’ rule was particularly helpful. Many thanks, Sarah.
So glad. That self editing problem holds so many writers back
Gonna disagree on the not reading part. I intentionally read from a variety of authors, at the same time, some within my genre, some adjacent, others completely different. I find this fuels my subconscious, and REALLY fires up my "muse". Like after doing a bunch of reading I find that the words just "flow", like my brain's been "primed" for the day's work, particularly on days when I'm not feeling inspired or I'm having a hard time. But I also love reading, sometimes obsessively, so it would be kind of hard for me to stop. Probably an addiction, I know.
She doesn't actually say don't read. She doesn't say don't read in your genre. She says don't read in your genre while you're writing. Different things work for different writers, but I think I see her point. Instead of being primed to emulate what you just read or saw on Netflix, write. Then go back to reading like a demon.
Does it fire up your muse... or put other people's plotting methods and voices in your mind? Not a bad thing for research, but not great for origninality during the creative side of the writing process
I agree to certain things. I start from scratch and write long-hand, pen and paper. When a chapter idea fades, I start a new one, and go until that begins to fade. That is the writing becomes rubbish and is not rolling out. Like you're so tired you can'6t even find conjunctions and phrases. I often write when I'm not writing. An idea will come up and I'll start a chapter. So, often I will have several, as many as 8 or 9 chapters going. Those take you wherever they take you and end themselves. Edit separately. Write when you are cooking, or cleaning or doing laundry. Keep a station or two open and when the sentences or paragraphs pop up, write. When you do this you can write as much as you want. Edit in the same manner.
Thank you!
Thank you very much for the advice. It felt as though you were speaking directly to me
Thank you. Very helpful ❤
Excellent advice! Reminds me of Robert Heinlein's six rules for writing.
I use both Word and Scrivner. Scrivner is a useful tool as a single source of character information, world building, research, and all the other underpinnings that aren't in the story itself. Writing in Word (and then pasting into Scrivner) lets me focus on just the writing of the draft itself without all the ancillary functionalities when sitting down to write. That said, there are a lot of gems to take from this video. Like with any gems, the art is in you polishing them to fit your vision.
Yes many authors rate Scrivenr highly and many of my novelists also still use record cards or post-it notes too
Wow. We really see eye to eye on a lot of this stuff.
thankyou! great video, straight to the point. I agree that one should not worry about bad writing at the mere start / first draft of their book… and, having read some comments before watching, at first I was quite displeased with the rule of not reading other books in your genre while writing, but when I actually got to that part of the video, and heard your reason why, I found it very reasonable indeed. Now that you mention it, it has indeed happened to me more than just once, that I have read or watched something new, and then I have looked at my own work, and thought, „really, I should make my story more like that”… I really like your sentiment of preserving one’s artistic integrity. Am going to write now. Great video. DANKE
Keep your creativity pure and let your story brew.
Awesome thanks
These were very helpful, thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks that’s exactly what I needed to hear 💝💝💝✨
Love this! I have done all the things you say not to do. Thank you, I needed to hear this.
Let's catch and correct those things
Great advice
After following two dozen supposed gurus over the years, I find your approach to writing the first draft most helpful. And I love your commanding confidence and clarity in delivery of the subject matter. Lastly, you have all the attributes of a true blue teacher I've been looking for.
Well thank you Mitch. I guess working on books for 17 years gives you some experience. Teaching is a calling too, and its about sharing knowledge which is so important.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation has a grade-school style prose but it’s a foundational (lol) and respected science fiction book nonetheless
- I use Livingwriter, which keeps my total word count. It's way easier to navigate than a single text document. I would avoid Scrivener due to all the horror stories of losing manuscripts, even with backups to Dropbox turned on. I prefer a native cloud editors like Livingwriter, Reedsy or Google Docs, with an occasional backup to Dropbox. - I agree with the frequent advice of not editing as you go. - It's an interesting idea not to consume media in your genre while you write. I found myself doing that naturally because it seems to pollute my vision. - Being very clear about my structure is very different from knowing what genre I'm writing in. I'm a pantser, though I prefer the term discovery writer. I certainly know my genre and my characters so far, but my best writing has come from discovery, not from structure. I don't think knowing what genre you're writing for" is the same thing as "structure". - "No such thing as good or bad writing" - I'm going to disagree with this one, too. In your explanation, you seem to revise this statement to more of a, "don't worry if it's bad writing, just focus on good story", which I agree with.
Good advice. I do a couple of these already but right now I’m in a slump. I hope to get out of it by next week.
One good piss-up will set ya straight, get over the hangover and you're on your way.
I completely understand
My girlfriend always sez "but you don't understand me!" and I say "What do you mean?"
Writers understand writers
So she advises you not to be influenced by the genre you're writing but also to box yourself within your chosen genre so you can adopt the stereotypical assets of said genre?
Thought the same but the one about not being influenced is once you start the writing process, and the one about genre is for when you do an outline prior to writing.
Its knowing the conventions.. and writing a story within those
Thanks for sharing 😊
Or second person can work, right? You know what you want to say so you say it.
@@thewritingroomlessons wtf?
You must, at the very least, glance at the last few sentences of the previous day's writing just to know where you are. This "never look back until you finish" is one rule that should never be set in stone, though.After all, A J Finn took one year to write The Woman in the Window and, by his own admission, edited as he wrote.
Look back don't edit it until you finish it
I find editing the previous day's writing works fine for me as long as I limit myself to only that. I won't go farther back than -1 day and edit earlier chapters until the whole thing's done, excepting when plot holes pop up that need immediate tending to. But also, I write with my story already fully outlined, so I know what my scenes are and can be fairly certain that most if not all scenes will make it to the final draft.
One thing I want to try is writing the first and or second draft on paper. Outlin on a doc. Write with pen and ink.
Rule 1: I write in RTF on Wordpad because I don't have word. I don't want a corporation seeing my writing and especially my editing steps so I am not training a Microsoft AI or giving them access to what I am doing as a conditon to have their software. I edit completely in RTF, trying to correct the punctiation and spelling mistakes myself. Then when I am finished editing I transfer it to google docs and see how bad of a speller I am (more like my stuff is half memorized and I am looking over the spelling errors). In google docs I correct both the red squiggles and the blue squiggles, then save the fully editited both RTF and Google docs to final revision. Rule 2: I instictively learned this rule when editing my first publicaton. Rule 3: The novel I am writing now was supposed to be a short story for a Story Unlikely contest, burned into a novel after writing a 67,000 word contemporary indie satire while I was writing it, so I agree with you. Sometimes reading can spoil your plans. (but I am glad it tuned into a novel) I like getting swept up, and when I go by the flow of the words instead of the grammer, then I go back and edit, but in my fiction and also being Appalachian, I will break my grammer for flow. Satire!
RTF is a solid package.. less distractions as well.
With regret, I agree about Scrivener. It's a wonderful product with outstanding customer support. Curio does what Scrivener would call a Research folder, and my word processor's navigation pane is analogous to Scrivener's binder. Choose a word processor with strong style support and you can do what Scrivener calls a compile by swapping style sets. You need to be able to do that anyway in case you want to write in a format different from what a picky editor wants to see. For me, Word is insufficient.
We are not popular here!
@@thewritingroomlessons How rude of me! I forgot to subscribe. Fixed that. Looking forward to more - have a great day.
I can't understand anything... Luckily, there's a transcript!
I guess this can work for some people, but I personally don’t think it’s realistic to say “write for at least an hour and don’t get up”. Plenty of people can’t do that.. plenty of people are writing in the spare bits of time that they have in a day. I also think that some organizational tools like scrivener are more than useful when it comes to writing in genres like sci-if and fantasy where the world building requires you to keep up with a lot of names, locations, and all sorts of made up stuff in the story. Without writing this kind of stuff down and referring back to it, you’re very likely to see inconsistencies in the story. I agree that it’s good to remember that it’s a rough draft and rough drafts are meant to be rough! Not getting boggled down on getting everything perfect allows you to actually finish the story and then go back and make all the changes necessary.
I perrsonally dont feel 20 min gaps of writing are what it takes for a novel. You may get somewhere with a non fiction which is a building block approach. But novels require immersion
At first some of this advice seems strange. But I remind myself that she is talking about first draft only.
Atticus is better than fighting formats in Google or Word docs.
Rule #5 Do not read any similar books to yours for the entire duration of your writing process. What happens is those ideas and voice may begin to creep into what you are writing... I don't know about you, but I don't want this. I do the same when I'm writing a song.
I disagree with her advice to not read within your genre while you write. Reading is how you learn how to write. To be a good writer, you need to learn to be inspired and awed by other people's work while maintaining your love and respect for your own work. Read. Never stop reading.
Or, do it your own way. Blaze your own trail. Rather stay true to myself and get no acclaim.
Like many authors I listen to, they also love reading the same genre….but not when they are writing. Because they do not want to get caught up in another author’s voice. I can totally see this happening. In fact when I’m writing ( cozy mysteries), I tend to read rom coms. I tried to read a cozy at the same time writing one and found their suggestions of not reading the same genre while writing it, absolutely spot on.
@@lp4265 Not all authors, though. MANY authors still read their genre while writing it. The difference is some of them will purposefully read _after_ the day's work is done, so they're not influenced by what they just read. This is why I think reading MULTIPLE books at once is extremely helpful: you're not being influenced by one author or one voice, but SEVERAL. And depending on how diverse your reading is, this can lead to some interesting collisions of ideas in your subconscious (i.e. "originality" which is really just freshness, which can sometimes be the smallest of tweaks on a given trope).
'Promosm'
Sorry, these don’t apply to me.
Lots of fans of Scrivener getting salty. But for your first draft, your very first draft, notepad will suffice. Even pen and paper. Anything more can be distracting. If you have been writing for a long time, this video clearly is not for you. Lol
When I am trying to give an advice I try to do it in the first person ;)
I write less the more I talk about my book
This video is grossly under viewed. I've watched I don't know how many videos. All of them giving the same dumb advice or just "busy work"
“Don’t read” is the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Reading in you genre is where a person learns the most about writing. There is definitely such a thing as bad writing.
I agree. I’m not taking their idea or comparing mine to theirs, I’m noticing method. The way they describe something, not in word use but in the choice of objects or setting and the purpose it’s serving, for example. It could be a billion different combinations, but it’s evoking something or leading somewhere. It’s doing something functionally important. That’s what I’ve always assumed authors meant when they said “the best way to learn to write is to read.”
I kind of get where she is coming from with her explanation. Although I disagree that you should stop reading the genre, especially if you enjoy it, I do get what she is saying.
I think she's close to a good point, for the longest time I kept changing ideas because I read something that made me think, that's good I want to use something like that, and ended up distracting myself. Ultimately I agree with your point, and I think her point could be bettered if she rephrased it as "don't read within the same genre and expect to find your influence refine your ideas through them."
She's not saying not to ever read books again. She's saying not to read books in the same genre of the book you're trying to write. And she's not saying you can't ever read that genre again; she's saying not to read that genre *while you're writing your book.*
@@KaraZiasapiens I don't think anyone here is under the impression she said to never read again. We know what she said. We just disagree. If you say "it's too easy to influenced" as an example, then you can do that with any material, not just within your genre. Especially if it's a multi-genre type story. Further, if we say that you probably shouldn't avoid adding something simply because it doesn't fit strictly within the lines of your genre, but it would add to your story and improve it, well that gets even worse. Her advice in this area spirals, which is one of my biggest issues with it. But also, i feel that if you're reading your genre while you're writing it, it actually becomes easier to stay in that lane. (More so, if you have multiple WIPS in multiple genres, reading in a different genre will take me away from the book im currently focusing on). To me, it's a bit like listening to a certain vibe of music while writing to stay in a specific mood while characters are expressing certain emotions. It's all individual, though. If someone has a hard time not being influenced in actual word use and direct material, what she said could be good advice, but if you can separate it and look for methodology and theme, you'd be fine. It could even improve your writing.
Nowadays authors speaking as if littérature was not a thing. As if it has never existed. Books are about stories, yes, maybe, but littérature is about form