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.