2018-03-232023-10-16 How To Finish Your First Draft: Four Rules for Survival A first draft is a battlefield of ideas tearing themselves apart. As you charge for the objective, injured ideas beg for your attention, plotting errors lead to landmines going off seemingly at random, research fox-holes beckon you to take a break and dive into something safe and intriguing, and critics (internal and external) direct bullets of self-doubt and flamethrowers of fear. You want the shiny ribbon they hand out with a finished piece of writing (there is no ribbon, but sometimes there’s money)? You want to repose in the comfortable fields called ‘draft revision?’ Here is the best advice I know how to give to get you across that tormented murder-land called a first draft. 1. Don’t Stop Writing All right now, remember. A war is mostly running. We run whether we are defending or attacking. If you can’t run in a war then it’s already over.Shichiroji, in Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa Basically, you have to keep going in order to get to the end. So whatever you do, don’t stop advancing. There are two big reasons for this; it keeps up your momentum, and it’s more efficient. The momentum part should be fairly obvious, so lets talk about the efficiency: You can write one chapter ten times, or ten chapters once. They’re the same amount of work, but one of them gets you a novel.Michael A. Stackpole, Fantasy & Science Fiction Author That ten spotty chapters might be better than one very polished one might not be obvious to you, but I assure you it is much better for the following reason: you can’t edit a novel that doesn’t exist. Editing requires a knowledge of the whole in order for due attention to be given to the part. So a lot of the editing you do on that one perfect chapter will end up wasted effort. One of the best kept secrets in writing long-form narrative (screenplays, novels, articles, doesn’t matter) is that the author seldom knows for sure where a piece is going until they arrive. Only in later revision do we go back and make it look like we knew all along, by sneaking in foreshadowing and setting up details that will turn critical later. What this means for rule number one is that you should not take time off from advancing the narrative to fix things – you’ll be doing major draft revision anyway, so you might as well save the housekeeping for later. To put it another way; there’s little value to cleaning the windows before you’ve finished installing the walls. Therefor, keep your eyes on the prize: finish the draft. This rule is so important and so counter-intuitive, that a huge portion of my job as a writing teacher is reminding people of it. Every writer I know, myself included, has at some point caught themselves painting tile arrangements in a house with no roof. Then it turns out the tiled wall was not constructed properly to support the roof, and so the tile ends up in the rubage heap. Don’t do detail work until you’ve got the macro-structure built. And I mean built, not plotted or planned – an outline is not the same as a draft. You want a draft because the process of drafting involves a fair amount of discovery. It is often those discoveries that bring the most color to a story, and until you have discovered them, you can’t properly edit for them. Keep Up Your Momentum: Make Notes, Not Corrections Keep a separate notepad with a list of things you’ll need to go back and edit later. For example: Chekov uses a gun in act two, so find a wall to hang it on in act one. Side character Meghann turned out to do really interesting things in the second half, maybe combine her with b-story Jackson, so she can be interesting in the first half too? Werewolves are a thing in this world starting on page 103. Who knew? Probably should mention that sooner considering what happens to Tom’s cat. Holy carp! I just realized I’m writing about fishermen and the ending is a MIND BLOWING metaphor about tides going out and I have no idea how tides work or when they happen! RESEARCH TIDES. ALSO CARP. Etc. Even if you want to change completely trivial details, like the name of a character, do not go back and change it right away, but just add it to your list. Tom is named Bob starting on page 25. Deal with it, future me. In essence, do no editing until your first draft is done. Don’t let the pen leave the page. Keep on, keep up, and don’t stop writing. Except… 2. Have a Plan There is an exception to Rule #1, when it isn’t just a good idea to stop writing, it’s necessary. The exception occurs when it is time to make a plan. What time is that? I’ll show you. I’ve watched hundreds of my students work on first drafts, and their enthusiasm levels follow a pretty consistent pattern. It goes something like this: When you first start the project there’s an initial wave of inspiration and excitement which you can surf for a while. For many, this is the most fun part of the writing process. For short pieces it’s all you need. But for long form, that wave eventually crests and crashes and most people stop writing. Those drafts look like this: Death is bad! Obviously, we can’t stop writing, so we have to figure something else out. Enter the Plan There are a few reasons I think of this first crash site as the perfect time to get your planning suspenders on and start scribbling on the walls. First, when the inspiration wave arrives it’s best to climb on and ride, but inspiration rarely arrives in the form of an outline for a whole story. Second, when designing a plan you need to know what you’re trying to achieve, and that’s difficult to know until you’ve put a few words on the page and started to see ideas take tangible shape. The initial hit of inspiration usually comes as a scene, or a character, or even just a really striking image. So when you start on that fist wave, you’re not usually building something vast and abstract like a plan for a novel. You could hold back and refuse to start your story until you’ve worked out all its twists and turns, but this would engage your inner critic before you’ve got anything tangible to criticize. Critics are inherently restrictive, and in order to keep on writing, we need to be careful when we let that jerk off their leash. Refer to rule one; ten wonky chapters are much better than one carefully crafted. Once there are a few words and ideas on the page, then you can take a step back and look at where it might be going, and what sorts of cool things you can do to get there. How To Make A Plot There are a thousand books on this. I’ll lay out a few of the pieces of advice I find myself repeating most often: A plot is just a sequence of events where each causes the next. Pixar developed a wonderful plot structure that goes: Once upon a time there was a _______, and every day they _______, until one day _______, and because of that _______, and because of that _______, until finally _______. This is by no means the only plot structure out there, but it’s a completely satisfying way to look at the question of how to make a story interesting. The critical advice here is to look at an event you know is part of your story and ask “what happens because of that?” And keep asking, until you get to the end. There are many kinds of plot structures, but the most useful to me has always been an itinerary of landmarks your audience will expect to see while touring the landscape of your particular genre. If you’re going to Paris you expect your tour guide to show you the Eiffel Tower right? When you’re reading a spy thriller you expect a few specific kinds of scenes: the clandestine meeting, the betrayal, the counter-betrayal etc. Make a list for your genre. That’s your outline/itinerary. What makes your book special is what you do with those landmarks, how you present them, and the commentary you layer over them. Consider events from the point of view of your antagonist. It’s easy to get caught up looking at the events as they effect the protagonist, which can lead you to run out of ideas. But the excitement of the story often flows from the intensity of the challenges, which will be motivated by the antagonist. Use the beginning at the end, and the end at the beginning. This is worth doing at every level: the normal Chekhov’s gun of putting any detail that matters in the second act into the first act too, but also in the big sense that the climax or conclusion can mirror the opening sequence in a way that reflects the characteristics of the theme. Endings are hard, so it’s often helpful to remember you don’t have to come up with a completely new thing: you just need to re-imagine the beginning thing. Have no fear. Go there. Try it. Do the thing. Filling your outline with exciting, edgy, interesting ideas is how you gas up your tanks with the energy you need to get through the rest of the process. But whatever you do with an outline, don’t overthink it because… 3. Forget the Plan, Trust Your Idea Your plan is the only thing you may be certain will not happen. My father was fond of quoting from his Marine Officer Candidacy training, which turns out to have been said by Helmuth von Moltke a 19th-century head of the Prussian army: No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.Helmuth von Moltke This is no joke. When you run into an antagonistic force, nothing ever goes as planned. Largely this is because the actual field of action contains far more variables than any plan could ever account for. The same might be said for your story; the field of possible decisions that might be made by your characters, of people they might meet, of problems they might suffer, is so vast, it cannot possibly be contained in a plot outline. Here’s somebody who was both a master at planning battles and penning books: Writing a book is not unlike building a house or planning a battle or painting a picture. The technique is different, the materials are different, but the principle is the same. The foundations have to be laid, the data assembled, and the premises must bear the weight of their conclusions. . .The whole when finished is only the successful presentation of a theme. In battles however the other fellow interferes all the time and keeps up-setting things, and the best generals are those who arrive at the results of planning without being tied to plans.Sir Winston Churchill As you write, things change, and grow, and weirdness occurs. It’s possible to get lulled into a bog by the will-o-the-wisps, but it’s also possible that gleam of gold off the beaten plot track is actually gold. In my experience, some of the most interesting things happen when characters you didn’t plan for point their scimitars up off the page and declare they have taken your story and if you want it back you’ll have to give them ten thousand unmarked, untraceable words. But how do you decide if you’re chasing swamp gas or fairies? Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.Dwight D. Eisenhower Your plan provides you with a deep set of understandings about the context of your narrative. Through the process of planning, you’ve learned about your world, characters, problems and skills. This contextual information should let your intuition engage with the question of what is or is not a good road to take through the woods. If that’s not working and you’re really hesitating, then go back to the planning board, adjust your plan, and always remember two crucial competing factors: If an idea is fun or compelling to you, then it will be to someone else. Pursue good ideas. There will be another project. If it’s too big a change, consider shelving it for use on the next project. When Your Plan Falls Apart and You Have Too Many Choices Trust the idea. That initial wave of inspiration should have come with a sweet flavor of delight. Capture that flavor early, and keep a vial of it ready in your memory. From that sweet flavor you must distil one particular interesting question or philisophical notion which you find compelling and exciting, usually tied up in a vibe you love: this is your theme. Your theme is worth defining during the plotting process because a well defined theme becomes a powerful weapon against the second-act slump. You can survive that slump by reminding yourself why you are writing that particular story, and the why is because theme is interesting to you. Return to your theme, and you will remember what makes the story worth telling. You will get up, and you can keep going. When plans fail, choices arise that you hadn’t considered, and those choices multiply infinitely. When these choices overwhelm you, the theme helps you decide among them. Compare each option to the theme, the vibe, the feeling that enchanted you to begin with, and select the options which best express your intent. Go back to the initial concept with each new idea, and throw away those which would change the flavor too much. And remember rule 1 because… 4. Expect Hell It comes like tax day – inevitable, dreadable, and completely manageable. I call it the 2nd act slump. Remember this? Yeah that’s a thing. And it’s worse than you expect, every time. No mater how thoroughly I’ve plotted a story, no mater how enchanted I am with the premise, characters, and plot twists, this still hits me like a bad flu; somewhere between the midpoint and the conclusion I start to doubt what I’m doing. The whole story, it’s purpose, everything. In this dark time, I want nothing more than to throw away the story and start over. Ideas that radically alter my concept become powerfully alluring. I doubt my own ability, my vision, and my purpose. The only advice I can offer at this time is this: when you started on this journey, you believed in something: you believed this story was worth telling. Trust that version of yourself. What they saw was worth something to them, and it will be worth something to the audience too. This is the time all the planning and preparing was for, when you must draw on everything you’ve crammed into your outline, all your ideas and enthusiasm, to keep you excited. In this time, let your theme rally you. Return to the theme, to the big questions, and engage with the characters. You may be tempted to abandon your plan: don’t. Keep writing. Trust the plan. Finish the draft. Turning out a column is easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.Red Smith This is not easy. Anybody who said it would be easy was lying to you. But it is possible, and the way you do it, is you sit down every day at the same time and focus on doing it. Your fingers move. The words appear. You hate them, but damn it they appear. And then, eventually, you have a draft. 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