How to Write a Vomit Draft—And Not Catch Feelings For It

Vomit drafts can teach you all about your work-in-progress—if you allow them to.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

When I tell people my forthcoming debut novel took 10 years to write, many look at me in awe. Wow, you labored for so long. 

The truth is, I did labor for a long time. But what’s also true is that for the first six years of the process, I wasted mad time laboring on words that weren’t worth the effort. You see, I kept combing over the same 150 pages I initially wrote after college because I had fallen in love with little moments buried in them—characters, action, dialogue, plot points, little turns of phrases, metaphors. Because I was in love, I imagined a future with this early draft or something that resembled it pretty closely.

A bound book, readings, a bestseller list.  

But I messed up, in a way that many young writers often mess up. In the parlance of my Bronx youth, I caught feelings way too soon. 

By wedding myself to these 150 pages, I see now—with startling clarity—I grounded myself in a version of the book that was only beginning to clear its throat. It was nowhere near the point of fully articulating who it was and what it needed. I didn’t know that, though.

As a result, for six years, instead of writing any substantive new material, I tried and tried to make different, subtly tweaked, versions of these initial 150 pages work. Eventually, I realized, around 2018, that I’d been clinging to them like a relationship that you know is wrong for you. 

It took me all those years to learn that, from the beginning, I should have treated those early words like the vomit that they were, instead of like gold to marvel at.

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When I re-emerged from the funk I entered into after realizing I’d wasted six years of my life, I vowed to do things differently. 

As I embarked on the first of what would be three or four full-scale, total rewrites of my novel until the version that sold was completed, I made two key changes to my process of vomit drafting that proved extremely useful. 

1. I focused on getting out as many pages as possible, even if I knew that a lot of those pages didn’t make any sense whatsoever. 

2. I focused on going anywhere and everywhere interesting in the draft–even if that meant going down a road I never intended on going down. 

For the next four years, I kept up my daily writing habit. I wrote in big bunches and never stopped to look back at what I had until I was done with a full draft (somewhere around 200 to 250 pages). 

I don’t want to pretend accumulating this writing was easy. It wasn’t. Within those 200 to 250 pages there were tons of random asides, plot points that didn’t make sense, grammatical errors, moments where I decided to change the tense of the novel for shits and giggles, and moments where I literally typed “blah blah blah something like this…”

Ignoring all of this was difficult—especially for someone who was used to going over what I’d just written with a fine-toothed comb. But ignoring it, and giving myself the freedom to dart all over the place, and, most importantly, chase the fun, without the pressure of having to clean things up, was a game changer.  

Because whenever I finally went and looked back at those big bunches of text, I was able to pinpoint quickly where the real energy of the writing was. While wading through all the crap—and there was a lot of it—I always stumbled upon a little section that seemed to jump off the page. Moments that made me laugh, made me feel something. Language or insights that rang true and made me think, Damn, I wrote that? It isn’t half bad. 

It was the sort of writing that would have never appeared if I had tried to make sense of it earlier on in the process. Writing that only appeared because I had effectively shut off the critical part of my brain and let the creative side that was only in search of fun and good times go wild.  

Sometimes this writing of interest was whole paragraphs, but usually it was just little lines and nuggets. To keep it 100, the good writing was probably only around 10 to 20 percent of the vomit draft. Often, the good writing wasn’t even that good yet. But something about the words suggested promise; told me: There is more here. 

For example, before I changed my approach, I often felt—and heard from early readers—that my protagonist, Javi, was flat. Often, my readers would be more captivated by my secondary character, Gio, who is Javi’s best friend, and who, in the early versions of my novel, did most of the brash things. He said the wrong stuff, got in trouble, and generally didn’t give a fuck. Javi, meanwhile, never stirred anything up. He was the good boy. Any drama he got into was usually the result of things happening to him.

Javi was like this in these early versions because I’d initially written him like this. But I realized, after writing through a couple of vomit drafts, sifting through the crap, and pulling out the good stuff, that, in fact, I was all wrong about Javi. Turns out, he wasn’t a saint. He was actually a dick! The kind of the guy that simply pretends to be righteous because he knows it wins him points. But in fact, he’s no better than a scheming hustler, playing on the emotions of others. 

I felt marvelous when I came to this realization. Finally, I thought, something I could work with. The sort of edge on a protagonist that can give me real mileage in a narrative. The sort of edge that can sustain a novel.

This realization happened around the Spring of 2020. Within two years, I had a draft of a brand new novel, with Javi being a dick at the forefront, and it was quickly sold. 

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A lot of writers have heard of vomit drafts. Hopefully, many of them even utilize the strategy. Hopefully you do, too. My intention here, however, is to remind you that the words that you actually produce writing these draft are, in fact, the vomit.

Please, don’t lose sight of that. 

Since selling my book, I sometimes have wondered how much sooner I could have done all this if I hadn’t made the mistake of looking at those early versions of my book as something more grand than what they were. If I hadn’t committed to them and instead pulled out what was interesting, and re-wrote, and re-wrote, kept vomiting and vomiting, until something started to coalesce. 

The truth is, I probably needed to go through the experience. I needed to waste those six years to really understand where I’d gone wrong. Perhaps those of you out there working on your first project need to do the same. 

But my hope is that my experience might give you a bit of courage to let go. To try smashing the glass you’ve encased your early efforts in. Write in search of new, beautiful moments that can transform entire chapters, or perhaps even the whole idea of what you thought your book was about. 

Ten years ago, I would have never thought Victim would end up being what it is. I thought of the whole story differently, thought of most of the characters differently. But I’m so glad those early 150 pages I clung to so fiercely never took off. I’m so glad I went through this journey, and learned what I had to learn. 

The version of the book coming out next year is so much better than what I had previously imagined. And it is only better because I moved out of the way and allowed it to be better. 

Peace, 

Andrew 

Recommendations: 

1. The Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast recently featured LL Cool J. It was an excellent conversation that tracks LL’s start as one of, if not the first, mainstream hip-hop artist, into an incredibly long and diverse career. Just think, LL Cool J influenced people like Chuck D and KRS One. And he’s still relevant. Wild.

2. Olivia Reingold wrote a great piece on Joe Rogan’s new comedy club in Austin, and the emerging comedy scene around it, for The Free Press. As a fan of stand-up, I’m looking forward to the next time I can get out to Austin and check it out. 

3. Speaking of writing advice, I stumbled upon a free e-book written by

   Freddie deBoer
   and packed with good advice for launching and sustaining a career—advice that is particularly of use for non-fiction writers. The tip I loved most was this one: “Whatever you do, be weird. As a consumer of writing, please, for me, be weird. Whatever this profession needs, it does not need more hall monitors or commissars and it does not need more writers who seem to have nothing to offer beyond looking down their glasses at the world in shrill derision... The whole point of writing, the only reason to have an alphabet, is to say what no one else is saying.” 

4. Kat Rosenfield
   , who consistently writes excellent essays critiquing popular culture, wrote a great piece for UnHerd about Jordan Neely’s death and the irony of some people, particularly progressive women, suggesting other women should put up with certain displays of behavior on the train that a few years ago they vowed were untenable. “If you argue that a woman can be traumatized by bawdy humor in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.” 

5. The acclaimed writer and Substacker,

   Sherman Alexie
   , wrote a powerful essay about Native American identity and the ways our PC parlance and tendency to group wide hoards of people together under generalized umbrellas actually does little to capture the essence of individuals. “I understand what the “I” in BIPOC is meant to convey pride and solidarity. And I agree with that mission. That mission is essential. But I think that ‘indigenous,’ as politically employed, has instead become a word that restricts the meaning of what it is to be an Indian. I think it has created a national and international illusion that the only proper way to be an Indian, or to be an Indian at all, is to be an Indian who is a leftist political activist.”