Why Imperfect First Drafts Matter

(Day 24 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

I want to tell you something that might be a relief if you’ve ever abandoned a first draft out of shame: Loveandpizza.it wasn’t born as the book you’ll be able to read soon. Oh, no… Not even close!

The First Version Was “Allowed” to Be Bad

My earliest draft had scenes that went nowhere. Dialogue that explained feelings instead of showing them. A pace that lingered where it should have run and rushed where it should have lingered. If you’d read it back then, you might have wondered what on earth I was doing.

I let it be that way on purpose, even if I didn’t fully know that’s what I was doing at the time. A first draft’s job isn’t to be good. I needed to get it out of my head first, so there was something to improve. You can’t edit a blank page. But you can have fun (or despair!) editing a messy one! 😅

The Gap Between Draft One and the Finished Book

This is the thing nobody tells beginner writers clearly enough: the story you’re trying to write and the story you’re capable of writing at draft one are rarely the same story. It took me nearly memorising Stephen King’s On Writing (affiliate link) to lock that lesson in properly. The gap between draft and finished manuscripts seems huge, and many times feels like an inevitable failure. That’s ok. When you realise that, you can more easily get to the place where all the real work happens.

The Carolina from that first draft existed mostly as a list of facts rather than a person you could feel breathing on the page. Napoli was mentioned rather than felt. The love triangle existed as a fact rather than an ache. None of that was a disaster, simply unfinished, just like a photograph is unfinished the moment the shutter closes, before it’s developed. (Well, not if you use your phone camera, but you know what I mean…)

What Actually Changed, and When

Here’s the honest timeline, because I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I had the idea for Loveandpizza.it in 2008 and wrote most of it while I was living in Napoli. By the time I sat down to do research for my MA in 2012, and spent two weeks “flaneusing” the streets of Napoli on my own, I understood the book in a completely different way than I had at the start, and that dissertation is where I properly worked out that Napoli needed to function as a character rather than a backdrop. The real transformation of the manuscript happened somewhere in those years between 2008 and 2015, long before it ever reached the Amazon catalogue.

By the time Loveandpizza.it was first published in 2016, that work was done. Carolina (and the other characters) had her full shape. Napoli had stopped being mentioned and started being felt. The love triangle had turned from a plot fact into something with real weight behind it.

So, what’s new, you may be asking… Nothing, really. This relaunch is only about typos, grammar, and translation into Italian and Portuguese. The book relaunching in three languages is the same one that was finished a decade ago, just properly dressed for its next chapter. 😌

If You’re Sitting on a Messy Draft of Your Own

If you have an idea brewing, a started/abandoned manuscript or a chapter sitting somewhere gathering dust because it isn’t good enough yet, I’d suggest that “not good enough yet” is exactly what a first draft is supposed to be. Stage one, nothing more.

That’s exactly the kind of unfinished, in-progress, permission-giving writing that happens inside The Writing Shed Club every week. Nobody starts with a polished page. Everybody starts with a messy one and works it into shape, together. There’s something new coming to the club on 1 August too, something built entirely around finishing what you start. More on that soon. If that’s the nudge you’ve been waiting for, [come and write with us →].

Your turn: do you let yourself write badly on purpose, or does the inner editor show up too early? 👇

Dani. x

New to the Loveandpizza.it world? Start here: https://danielapescuma.com/category/loveandpizza-it/

P.S. Loveandpizza.it is coming back in English, Italian and Portuguese. Save your slice and you’ll be first to know the moment your edition’s ready. 🍕