First draft ✅

a few thoughts about writing a new mystery novel and mental health

Here’s a Mitch Hedberg joke about rewrites:

I wrote a script, and I gave it to a guy who reads scripts, and he read it, and he liked it, but he said he thinks I ought to re-write it. I said, “Fuck that — I’ll just make a copy!”

I thought about that joke yesterday, then I searched for it on YouTube, then I went down a Mitch-shaped rabbit-hole. I didn’t feel guilty about wasting my afternoon writing session. I was celebrating the fact that I had just finished the first draft of a new novel — and psyching myself up for the Sisyphean process of rewriting that novel.

Supposedly, Ernest Hemingway once said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting.” Writers aren’t supposed to argue with Hemingway. There are two reasons for this. First, he’s Hemingway and you’re not. Second, Hemingway’s ghost will fight you; I once saw him kick Tom Clancy’s ass at a bake sale to raise money for the library in Key West, Florida. True story.

But at the risk of getting my ass kicked by a ghost and revealing myself to be a hack, I think Hemingway is wrong. There are two kinds of writing. The first kind is where the writer, somehow, turns nothing into something. The second kind of writing is rewriting, which is the process of turning something into a story.

For me, yesterday marked the end of a five-month process that began with nothing and ended with something. In my case, that something is a manuscript for a mystery novel. I’ve got something — but at the moment that something is a hot mess of exposition, plot holes, under-developed characters, dead-end subplots, and jokes that, quite frankly, suck. But that’s OK. Actually, that’s great! Now, I have something to work with. I can rewrite a scene that doesn’t work, but I can’t rewrite a scene that doesn’t exist. This is progress.

Getting to the first draft on this project put me through the ringer. I’m still unpacking the details, but the gist is that I’ve struggled with depression my whole life, and now that I’m somewhere in the messy middle of that life, I’ve recognized a pattern where my depression undermines the work I want to do, ultimately driving me into a dark place where I actually believe that I never wanted to do that work in the first place. Like I told my therapist, it’s a “clusterfuck of negative thoughts.”

Back in March, I wrote about depression. Or, more specifically, I wrote about how it feels to hit bottom, seek help, and find yourself in Joseph Heller’s shitty first draft of Catch-22. Facing that particular episode of my depression, and eventually seeing and coming to terms with a depressive pattern in my life, was painful. It was also liberating. Once I understood that the negative voice in my head — a voice I call K-Fuck Radio — wasn’t my voice, I learned to tune it out. (Note: tuning it out remains a work in progress, and in my case, the right drugs help a lot).

With my head relatively free from a “clusterfuck of negative thoughts,” two things happened. First, I rediscovered my passion for reading and writing crime novels. Second, I learned that if you drop the bags of emotional crap you never needed to carry in the first place, it’s a lot easier to get shit done.

And get shit done, I did. It took me exactly five months and two days to go from nothing to something. I kept track of my progress with an un-patented system that involves color stickers and a calendar that features natural objects that look like dongs. If that sounds silly, it’s because it is. But there’s a method to the madness. For me, depression is a kind of sadness that lives simultaneously in the past and the future. If left untreated, depression swallows the present. The stickers are an effort to live in the now, to paraphrase Garth Algar. The dong calendar is a cheap way to make sure the present — especially those writing sessions where you just aren’t feeling it — is more silly than sad.

Which brings me to the second kind of writing — rewriting. Tomorrow, I start revisions. It’ll be a slog. The process will likely take another five months, maybe longer. When I think about the work ahead, I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my eyes, and convince myself that quitting is the only sane move because I never really wanted to write a novel in the first place. But that’s not true. The only thing I want more than to finish writing this novel is to share it with you.

Which is exactly why I’m working so hard to focus on the present. In the present, the past can’t haunt me and the future can’t taunt me. The present is where I get shit done. For me, rewriting is one word at a time, one scene at a time, one sticker at a time, one day at a time, one dong per month.

I’m on a podcast talking about fiction!

My friend

Meg Oolders

invited me onto her podcast to talk about writing fiction, self-publishing fuck-ups, and being a medium-sized deal on Wattpad. You should listen.

09 | Absolute Hilarity Ensues Absolutely

Have I got a story for you!

My novel is called Not Safe for Work, and it’s the perfect book for anyone who loves slacker noir stories like The Big Lebowski, Fletch, or Inherent Vice.

Pick up a copy of Not Safe for Work on Amazon, or all the other book places.