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Drafting


Student of Trinity

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Okay, it turns out that there's a big difference between having a first draft of a novel, and having a novel. In principle I knew this, but I didn't appreciate what the difference was. I had the idea that if all had gone well it would mainly be fine-tuning prose; and that otherwise I might have to make major changes, like adding or removing characters, or radically revising the plot. It turns out that there's a whole lot of stuff that I now have to do, in between those extremes.

 

Having a first draft means that you have a lot of stuff. Around 100,000 words, if you want to call it a novel. You may have more than that, and think that's good. That's a lot of stuff, all right.

 

Is it all the right stuff? That seems to be what the second draft is mainly about.

 

With the first draft I found that I had the main characters, and the main plot sequence, and a lot of nice individual scenes and episodes. But going through it again, now, it's depressing to realize how many of those nice scenes and episodes are really digressions from the main plot. I wrote them, and racked up word count to make a chapter, and thought that was progress. It was; but it was the progress of a pretty meandering river. Some of my nicest scenes are little oxbow lakes, totally cut off from the main flow as it later evolved.

 

The emphasis is off in a lot of places, too. Things that actually turned out to be rather minor still take up too many lines, because when I first wrote them in I thought they would be more important. And some things that turned out to be major themes got pretty short shrift.

 

And I also completely missed some stuff. Like, somehow my main villain ended up with way too little presence in the book. He appears for a quick scene now and then, and says a few words, but he doesn't actually do much at any point. On re-reading, he's a pretty token villain. Kind of a patsy, only there to get beaten. In my mind he was more than this, but too little that was in my mind made it into my book. Whoops.

 

I believe now that I would have been smarter to work harder on a more detailed outline. But I also see that extensive revisions in a second draft are probably unavoidable. A lot of good stuff comes up as you write. Some things that started out as digressions grow into major threads. Pounding out a detailed outline and sticking to it strictly would probably make a pretty lifeless book. You can definitely save a lot of time, though, by asking sooner rather than later: this is a cool scene, but does it move the story along? Or, conversely: is there something missing that should be in here already?

 

It's as though there are two quite different tasks involved in writing. Maybe a good writer is a kind of symbiotic organism, like a lichen. One half generates energy, and the other provides structure. There's having ideas and writing along to see what happens with them, and discovering more ideas as you write along. But then there's being disciplined about making a book that someone else will actually want to read, by making sure the plot is coherent and avoiding bloat. I doubt that either kind of writing by itself will make a good novel. Probably it's the first kind of writing that most people think of when they think they'd like to write, but I can definitely see how the first kind alone will produce something that only the author can read. The second kind is really necessary, and it's not as much fun.

 

Or at least, it's not fun in the same kind of way. It's more of an analytical task, and less creative. Sometimes it will generate interesting creative challenges, though. For instance, once I realized that I really needed to beef up my villain in his final scene, I had the fun idea of giving him a gun, even though he's a medieval type who's not supposed to have anything more sophisticated than a crossbow. I think that'll do the beefing up job very nicely, and it also ties in well with the main thematic threads.

 

On the other hand, I'm going to have a tough time getting in more dialog among my villains, giving their point of view, because my narrator is one of the objects of their villainy. Since my overriding goal is to avoid stupidity, I can not have the bad guys just start monologuing to the hero to explain their plans. I think I'm going to have to figure out a way for the hero to eavesdrop on them. It's totally in character for him to try to do that, but it's not going to be easy for him to accomplish it. He's in their castle, he has only medieval technology, and he's too big a guy to hide behind an average curtain.

 

I hope I'll figure something out; the challenge is interesting, anyway. I'm beginning to wonder whether this could be a shark that's better left unfixed. So far I've considered a couple of neat ways of fixing it, but they seem to have fatal flaws.

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