The Draft Before the Draft

The weeks of work that come before writing a single sentence of your first draft. What you're not told about how important proper backstory is.

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Hello. Currently writing this from the depths of test anxiety, but it’s a lovely little brain break to come here and talk about writing. I’m rather excited because I’m very close to starting my first draft of my new project.

I’ve talked a lot about my writing journey here, especially on these Wednesday Pages. You’ve been with me through several projects, each one approached slightly differently. While I still love them all, they weren’t quite right for me at the moment. Apparently, now I am Goldilocks.

For this project, I have decided to be patient. A novel concept! By slowly working out questions and kinks in my idea, I hope to have a more solid foundation for my first draft. My recent issues have laid in me being unsure how to move forward. Typically, I know the catalyst of my story, but I don’t know how to recover from it. For example, I decided on a murder mystery within a fantasy story, but I genuinely couldn’t decide who the murderer was. I ran through several options, but none seemed quite groundbreaking enough. Ultimately, I realized that I hadn’t done proper world building and backstory to understand why. Why were the people killed in the first place? What consequences did that place on my main character?