Cross It Out - Start Again - Dramatize

Sure, it can be fun to blaze through a first draft, and it can feel amazing to see how the text accumulates. How often do you look at “word count” and feel a well-deserved sense of accomplishment? Pages are getting filled! Characters are starting to make decisions!

But you know that it’s in the drafting (and drafting and drafting) that the magic happens. You can’t even see what you've created until you step away for a moment, take a deep breath, and read through the fresh pages. “Oh,” you think, “it seems that I was aiming for X and Y here. Let’s try to get closer to that ideal.” So you start again, you add richness and detail and dialogue and brilliant thought, and you find that you’re a little closer. It’s a long process, and each draft is much more than just tinkering with sentences. There’s a point at which merely noodling with a sentence just isn't going to bring the text (and idea) to life. You can change a word, add a comma, reorder the clauses, but you know (deep down) that you’re not yet getting at what you know needs to occur in order to dramatize your idea.

And “dramatize your idea” is at the heart of the drafting process (and at the heart of fiction writing, of course). Here are some sentences that might appear in a draft:

• It felt like an invasion.
• The tone of his voice made me feel terrible.
• I was wounded by her glance.
• If only she were the person I wanted her to be.
• Never had he been so excited.
• He felt his father’s absence.

These sentences work as shorthand for what you eventually want your text to accomplish. And these sentences are borderline cliché (if not full-blown cliché). Yes, early in the drafting process we all occasionally fall back on cliché and shorthand. This isn’t a problem as long as you know what the next step is.

You can take any of the example sentences, create descriptions and actions to follow the sentence, try to add more information to make the original sentence make more sense. But if you leave in that original sentence, you might also have created a strange hybrid of showing and telling. Your readers will say, “Hmmm, I understood what you were getting at through following the action, but you also told me what you were getting at in this shorthand sentence. I’m not that obtuse. Trust me!”

So … try this: just cross out the original sentence, turn to a blank page, and start over. Create the idea through action, image, interesting contemplation, projection, memory, dialogue, and/or the careful creation of a world that demonstrates through its rich details what the underlying drama is.  

Here are examples of how you might begin to rework two of the shorthand sentences from above (these are only examples, not rules of any sort—there are a million ways to address the problem):

It felt like an invasion.

    Enter the moment. How does an “invasion” manifest itself? Is the character physically crowded, knocked out of his comfort zone? If so, what does that look like? What does he see? How does his body react? And then, to demonstrate how that “invasion” alters the character and sets him on a fresh trajectory, think of how he pushes back against the invasion. Does he retreat? Does he lash out? Let the reaction to that feeling of invasion create fresh, informative drama.

If only she were the person I wanted her to be.

    To begin with, make some notes: describe the person the narrator wants the woman to be, and then describe the person the woman currently is. Then let the tension between desire and reality drive the tension in a scene. What does the narrator gain if the woman behaves as desired? What does the narrator lose if the woman fails to conform to his desires? Push the narrator’s desires directly into the action, complicating his feelings for the woman, breaking the status quo, pushing the story in a fresh direction.

Now, try it yourself. Look at the text of your novel and find a sentence that seems to be shorthand for something important. Cross out the sentence. Start over. Act out the idea behind the shorthand. Don’t let new shorthand creep in! Trust that your reader will understand what’s going on without having it also explained to her. 

When You Don’t Hear What You Want to Hear

We’ve all been in this situation: You hand off a chapter or entire manuscript to a workshop or agent or editor, and you hope to hear that things are working pretty well except for a few tics and clarity issues, and what you hear instead is that on some basic level the pages aren’t working. You thought you’d already addressed the problems. You thought you’d finally found a way to rearrange the material so that its complexity and beauty have both risen exponentially. Nope. The pages still aren’t functioning to their potential, or their potential has been reached and the piece remains flat or clichéd or in need of an explosion or alien invasion. What the hell are you supposed to do now? First, don’t despair. Really. This has happened to everyone. Take a moment to breathe, to think about the positives in your piece, to remember all you’ve learned in the process of producing those pages. Then you have a few choices:

1. You can give up. Just pick up your manuscript and disappear. If people aren’t going to say you’re good, they don’t deserve your presence. This, of course, is the most mature response.
2. You can just keep sending out the manuscript as it stands. Maybe someone will like it. After all, it was just one opinion. But if you keep getting the same response, you can either fall back on #1 or move on to #3.
3. You can take the critique to heart. You don’t have to agree with everything you’ve been told, you don’t even need to care what anyone says, except to the point that the critique forces you to look at your work with fresh eyes. Sure, they were wrong about this or that, so ignore them on those points. But clearly things can be working better, and you have to figure out where and how.
4. You can remember what your original idea was, and focus on how that idea has grown and morphed over time. Your readers see a certain potential in your work, and maybe that potential isn’t at all what you had in mind or even what you want to write. Maybe you’ve gotten off on the wrong track, and you no longer understand how your pages are coming across to your readers. Do your readers’ comments offer a potential for your piece that seems more interesting and complex than what you thought you were writing? It might be worth your while to take some time to sketch out that new version, to see if there are parts of it that you can incorporate in your story.
5. You can start over. Yes, we’ve all been in this situation, too. The manuscript isn’t working, so you figure out why, you figure out a solution, and you open your notebook (or open a new document on your computer) and start again. It’s not a big deal. It’s called “writing.”
6.  Here’s the big one: You can put the project aside and chalk it up to experience. Are you willing to do the work to make the pages function to their highest potential? Maybe. Maybe not. If you’ve lost your momentum, if you feel despair rather than joy as you write, maybe you should be writing something else.

I’ve done all of these steps more than once, myself (well, I never did give up—I never took my soccer ball and left the field, and I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to do that, either). I’ve dropped projects altogether. I’ve started over. I’ve cut hundreds of pages that weren’t working, even though I might have eventually made them work through pure force of endless effort. But I learned from each and every step along the way. I learned to let go of all that hard work, to put my ego aside, to challenge myself in the face of a hard critique. They want me to make this part shorter? I’ll make it longer, and I’ll knock their socks off in the process. If you have the guts to make it as a writer, you need to be able to rise to every challenge along the way, to come back with a manuscript that doesn’t just address the surface problems but raises the stakes and the craft to new levels. It’s a tough business. Your ego will be battered more than once. But the most amazing part of working with aspiring writers is seeing how many of them respond to critiques with courage and true artistry. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s brave. It’s at the core of being a writer. 

Why Wait? Write Your Novel!

It’s time to write (and finish!) that novel you’ve been noodling with for…well…for a while, because if you don’t write it now then when the heck were you planning on writing it? Maybe you have a hundred random pages written in a notebook, and you’ve sort of lost track of your characters (they were here a minute ago, but now they’ve wandered over there and they seem to have joined the navy). Maybe you have an idea that percolates along but never really boils over onto the page. Maybe you even have a full draft that needs some time and attention to make it amazing (and ready for publication). All these maybes are part of the process, so don’t let them frustrate you. Your subconscious is constantly working on your novel, whether you know it or not. Your seemingly disjointed pages in that notebook are the necessary preparatory work for plot and character, demonstrating where your novel could or should go and (equally important) where it probably shouldn’t go. (Believe me: I have stacks of notebooks full of shouldn’t.) And just because you’ve finished a draft of your novel doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re done. (Believe me, again: I was pretty much finished with my current novel when I realized that the point of view was wrong…so, back to the beginning for a recasting of the whole shebang.)

I’ve been novelizing fairly constantly for over twenty years, and along the way I’ve learned a few things about (1) what I need to know, (2) what I’ll never know, and (3) what I hope I’ll never find out about the whole gigantic process of writing a novel. Here you go:

1) The most basic thing I need to know has turned out to be “why does this story matter to me?” Attached to that question is the vital “why are my characters interested in acting out my personal obsessions?” Not all that surprisingly, you need to care about the story you’re writing, especially because a novel can take a hundred years to write, give or take ninety-six years, and you have to remain engaged throughout the whole process.

2) I realize that I’ll never know exactly why I write the novels I write or where exactly the characters come from, and I’ll never fully understand why certain ideas and images obsess me and repeat in my novels—and that’s okay, because part of the beauty of the writing process is how your own ideas can surprise you when you read them on the page. “Where the hell did that come from?” It came from your brain, and chances are you know very little about what goes on in your brain, but letting your brain write your novel might teach you a few things about it (your brain, that is).

3) And I hope I’ll never find out exactly how many hours I actually spend writing a novel. Trust me: You don’t want to know, not if you’re interested in how much money you make per hour. But you don’t write a novel for the money, or, more accurately, I don’t write a novel for the money (though I’m not averse). I write novels because they’re huge and fun and complicated, and I write because I like being surprised by what ends up on the page.

So, don’t be intimidated. Don’t wait. Take the leap and write that darn novel! It’s not going to write itself. And you don’t want to look back in five or ten years and say, “If only I’d written that novel. I could’ve been a contender.”

(Post originally appeared on The Lighthouse Writers Top-Secret Blog (http://lighthouseblog.org/).)

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