Krista Puttler: A LITTLE SECRET • Writing Tips

Krista Puttler
A LITTLE SECRET

Sometimes the first draft is… the one.

Okay, before you throw your red pens at me (you still print out your drafts and edit by hand, don’t you?), hear me out.

Obviously, the first draft is just that, a draft. But the idea—the thing your brain has been thinking about while you have been moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer, while you have been putting the wrong child’s underwear in the wrong underwear drawer, that first ruminating group of words that you allowed yourself to hastily scribble down, that you can’t stop thinking about while you stand in front of the mirrored window at ten o’clock at night squinting at your neck and wondering if your neighbors can also see the sunspots that have suddenly bloomed in the hollow space between your collarbones—that unpolished group of words is what you want to write about.

It’s the idea you finally get to three paragraphs in from a weekly writing prompt—which you usually just laugh at and delete but for some reason the one about exploring a “stable truth” or a “stable falsehood” makes you roll your eyes up to the ceiling… and you remember the other house that had the ceiling with a dark blue slime stain on it. And then you remember lying below another ceiling in that same house, a ceiling that you could not see at the time because it was dark and you were asleep, but if you had woken up ten seconds earlier and switched on your bedside light, you would have seen a cockroach absurdly scuttle a little ways across that ceiling. And then you would have moved out of the way instead of waking up because the cockroach had fallen into your mouth. That idea.

It’s so absurd, you keep writing about it. And when your twenty-five-minute timer goes off, you flip back in your notebook, and you have absurdly written eight pages about this idea. You go finish a load of laundry. You walk the dogs and try not to dislocate your shoulders as you pass by three feral cats. You forget about the idea.

The next day, you faithfully transcribe the eight pages into a blank computer document. It is awful. You close your laptop and go walk the dogs again.

The day after, you like the third sentence of the fourth paragraph. The rest you highlight. All you have to do is push that rectangular button with the middle finger of your right hand. Delete. It is so easy to do.

Don’t do it.

Cut and paste it to the end of the document after the heading EDITS. Over the next day or week or month, type another one or five or fifteen pages. The idea stares back at you in the window. Open your notebook and answer the next week’s writing prompt. It’s something about waiting.

That night, you dream that you deleted everything after the word EDITS.

The next day, you open your laptop. You scroll all the way down to EDITS. You read those first eight transcribed pages. They aren’t good, but you like the idea. If you move this paragraph to the beginning, and add the new part that is up on page three, and move that original third sentence from the original fourth paragraph to the end… Yes! That is what you were trying to do. And now you understand what else you have to do to write it better.

Krista Puttler has been fortunate to call many places home including Norfolk, Virginia, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, and a stateroom on an aircraft carrier. Her previous contributions to Cleaver include “Origin Story,” which appeared in Cleaver Issue #48, and “Four Emotional Corners,” a writing tip. Elsewhere, her nonfiction has appeared in As You Were: The Military Review, Collateral, Cagibi, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Intima, Door is a Jar, and HeartWood Literary Magazine. A medium-roast coffee gal at heart, she is pleasantly surprised by how much she loves Italian espresso. Krista Puttler lives outside Naples, Italy with her husband and three daughters.