I heart failing fast

I've struggled quite a bit with the transition from writing non-fiction to fiction. But what made it easier is that, having spent 10 years in daily journalism, I have a invaluable and fairly transferable set of writing tools.

One of them is the strategy of "failing fast." You find this adage in business and it applies well to writing, too. It's not a new concept in literary fiction, in fact, but that's not where I learned it.

As a reporter on deadline, I didn't get writer's block. I couldn't. I simply had to come up with words and fast, and whether they were in the same key or not was something to worry about later. My individual strength, however, was being an extremely fast writer, even for a journalist. I could and often did write 15-inch breaking news stories in ten minutes or less. Not Pulitzer stuff, mind you. But the basic story was there.

This had several advantages. By writing a less-than-stellar rough draft, I was able to see very quickly what elements I was working with and what parts were missing. If I wrote my first draft fast enough, there was a good chance I had would have time to make that extra call to get the final detail or confirmation I needed.

The second advantage of this strategy was that it got me thinking about the story, whether I was initially in the mood to do so or not. Once I had something on the page, even if it was a bunch of poo, and especially if it was a bunch of poo, I couldn't turn away. It had to be fixed.

Which is tied to the third advantage: It is much easier to fix an existing draft than to start with a blank page. It's getting the hard work out of the way -- the content, i.e. the who what where when why how.

I'm not surprised to be running into this concept in fiction. Without even realizing it, this is how I approached the novel. Looking at each chapter as its own story, I found myself getting the words down first (usually by hand, which I often did as a reporter in the field), then refining it until I thought it was good enough for my writing group.

I realize some writers can lay down an entire first draft of a novel straight through, beginning to end, before tackling revisions. I don't ever see this being an option for me; with full time work and five kids, breaking things up was way more practical.

So too has been the failing fast strategy. For folks like me, there ain't no time to fail slow.