The Dangers of Overplotting
Or: How I wrote a Truly Terrible First Draft
Greetings!
This is the first Emerson Black Writes newsletter of 2025, and I’m thrilled you’re reading it. Thank you for being here.
It’s Wednesday and I’m sitting in a cafe on Regents Canal. Earlier, while I was doing my morning’s writing, I had a sudden feeling of overwhelm. I’m two months into the second pass of Seen in Silverbridge Book 3, and as rewrote the same chapter for what felt like the tenth time (it’s a chapter in which Rodney walks in on Huds in a very compromising position with something he shouldn’t be with), I worried that I might never, ever finish this book.
I’m here now, taking a breather, drinking my third cup of coffee of the day (I drink decaf at home now, so I can sleep), and deducing where and how I went wrong.
What I Did Differently
For the first two books of the Seen in Silverbridge series, I followed the same process as I have for my other books and films.
Write a loose outline
Write a first draft
Realise what the story is truly about
Rewrite
Fine tune
See step 4. Rewrite? That step takes a lot of time, and a lot of brain power, often as much as writing the first draft.
I’d started to expect the ‘second pass’ to be a page 1 rewrite, a massive task that almost made it feel like all the time I spent writing the first draft was wasted. During the second pass, I’m spending so much time fixing the Big Picture problems that I don’t have the brainspace to dedicate to the actual ‘writing’, and by that I mean the prose, diction, prosody, elegance, and style.
That comes in the third pass, the ‘fine tune’ pass.
All up, writing a novel takes me about 6-9 months. Not bad, you say? Well, it wasn’t fast enough for me. I wanted to streamline it. Optimise.
My Prime Suspect: The Outline
For this book, I thought I’d shake it up. Just over a year ago, I sat down in a cafe in South London near London Bridge (Chapter 42, I think it was called) and got out my laptop to plan this book.
Free jazz played on the sound system, an awful genre of music in any other case, but a cute novelty on this particular day. An Americano was £2.50, a bargain for London, and I had two hours until I’d meet Julia for dinner. As I looked at my outline, I couldn’t help feeling startled by its thinness. It was barely two pages long, sparse one-liners for chapters that gave minimal information: Luce and Jordan argue about the wedding guest list. Rodney visits an old friend at the University of Sydney. Faven buys a crystal from a new age shop, then is asked out by (spoiler alert).
It wasn’t enough. I knew that if I moved forward with a first draft based on this outline, the natural process of writing would take me on crazy tangents, resulting in a bloated, sprawling first draft. The second pass would be a mission.
So, I decided I’d write a more detailed outline. If I had a more intricate framework, I wouldn’t wander so much during the first draft, right? Right! Instead, I’d probably just need to adjust some commas, change the odd adjective here and there, and I’d be ready to publish!
Instead of moving ahead with a first draft, I fleshed out the outline … to 51 pages.
The ‘Treatment’ problem
I printed out the 51 pages at the Hackney library, feeling like a legitimate writer. Jules and I flew to Málaga and, for a week I sat by the pool, going through the outline with a red pen, refining every beat of every chapter until I’d nailed it. Upon our return to London, I felt ready to start the first draft.
For three months, I followed a strict routine. Every morning, coffee in hand and headphones on ear, I’d open my Scrivener project. Where usually I’d reread yesterday’s work, this time I simply relied on my outline. It was so detailed! All I had to do was grab my chapter synopsis and build on it, treating every scene like a standalone story.
A typical synopsis for a chapter might look like this:
Luce is in her hotel room, surrounded by brochures for wedding venues and floral options. Jordan arrives from practice, agitated, and says that Huds accosted him in the gym and he doesn’t want him coming to the wedding…
And on it went, detailing everything that would happen in a chapter. It was more of a Treatment than an Outline. You can see how easy it would be to translate that into a chapter. Like beads of dew on a spider’s web, they’d link up to create something beautiful, I was sure of it.
After I completed the first draft, I felt strange. Even though I’d spent three months hanging out with my favourite characters, there was an emptiness to it. I hadn’t felt like I was embodying them and experiencing the story as they did, more like I was dictating what they did and how they felt to a third party. Like I was watching them on a TV screen.
After I finished the first draft, I didn’t look at it for a fortnight. Then, trying to feel confident, I read it.
The Worst I’ve Felt as a Writer for Years
I took myself to a cafe (there are a lot of cafes in this story, isn’t there?) and got into it.
The first chapter, written from Huds’s point of view as riot police storm Luce’s engagement party to shut it down, was good. Perhaps a bit redundant, because the second chapter dealt with the same plot point, the only difference being from Luce’s point of view… but it was fine.
It got worse from there. My first draft, totalling 104,000 words, was the messiest, most sprawling and nonsensical morass of crap I’d ever written.
Amongst the mess, I’d penned some clever turns of phrase, funny dialogue, and some satisfying payoffs, but these were minor consolations, like lipstick on a pig. The characters’ decisions made little sense, the mystery clues felt crowbarred into the scenes, and I felt like I was reading scenes adjacent to the real story.
I’d written everything according to my detailed outline, and that was the problem. I vastly underestimated the beauty of ‘discovery’ that comes during writing a first draft.
Back to Page 1
As I read the entire manuscript again, I made notes about what I’d like to change. But I quickly found the notes weren’t simple, like: Remove the scene in the tram, put Rodney’s inner monologue into dialogue in the scene in the changing rooms.
Instead, they were … significant, like: This entire chapter tells us nothing. Remove.
A third of the way through, the story was telling me it wanted to go in a very different direction from what I’d written.
An entire subplot with a chemical biologist who steals blood from famous sportspeople felt redundant. Faven vacillated between being boy-crazy and childishly prudish. Rodney more of less disappeared for almost one hundred pages in the middle of the book.
My second pass wouldn’t be as easy as deleting a few chapters and swapping paragraphs. No, siree. The second pass would be a full, page 1 rewrite. With a new story.
What’s so strange to me is: I’m not a new writer. I should have seen this pitfall coming. And yet there I was, mired in a hell of a quag.
I’d basically wasted three months and 104,000 words.
Time to Move Forward
Okay, so I started the second pass. As I suspected, it’s taking a lot of energy and time. I’m about 60% of the way through now. About twice a week, I get the same feeling of overwhelm, thinking about the gargantuan the task ahead.
“It’s terrible,” I complain to Jules, three or four times a week. “I’m pushing shit uphill. I’ll never get there. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever written.”
Luckily, I’m more than up for it. I love the Silverbridge characters—Luce, Huds, Faven and Rodney—and I’m having a blast throwing them into a new, ridiculous adventure and seeing what they do.
While they’re investigating their latest mystery, poor Huds is struggling with the idea that Luce is about to marry Jordan, but he doesn’t know what to do. Faven is officially ready to enter the dating world, and Rodney is struggling with a father’s worst nightmare.
As far as hobbies go, writing the Silverbridge books rates damn high. I’m so excited to finish writing it so you can read it. Wish me luck!
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