From The First Draft To The Last, Part 2

First the bad news: If you thought we were going to be able to wind up this reader-request post today, it looks like we were both mistaken.

The good news? Well, I should hope that the prospect of a Part 3 doesn’t make you peevish.

To recap, Part 1 looked at the process of simply getting down the first draft of a work, warts and all, followed by various broad-stroke troubleshooting that gets the whole ready for more closely focused revisions. Maybe you’ve heard the formula for carving a marble statue of a horse: Get a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse…? Part 1 is akin to getting your block of marble.

Looking ahead, Part 3 will tackle higher-level refinements.

Here and now, though, we bridge that gap.

This can be a time for courage. Courage, faith, and possibly some potent anti-depressants. One of the hardest things to do as a writer can be to give yourself permission to make a complete hash of things the first time. I know this on a head-level, and on a heart-level still struggle with it.

Fortunately, we’re not working in marble here. Words are endlessly malleable, and there’s nothing about them that can’t be fixed later.

Drudge Report: The Niggly Bits

This is the stuff that isn’t fun, doesn’t feel creative, and isn’t even particularly rewarding. It’s like middle management. But it has to be done, or your work risks coming off like it was written by a mental patient.

Maintaining consistency and continuity. You know how jarring it can be in a movie when, say, a character is handcuffed by the left wrist in one shot, and in the next, he’s cuffed by the right?

Don’t do that.

The longer a work is, and the longer it takes to write, the harder it can be to keep track of every little detail. Sometimes you change things, sometimes you just forget. In the first hundred or so pages of the initial draft of my novel Mad Dogs, the main character’s name kept toggling from “Jamey” to “Jamie.”

Names, spellings, places, colors of hair/eyes/clothing/etc, dates, pieces of backstory … these are just some of the details that can trip you up. Maybe, midway through, you changed the name of the main character’s brother-in-law from Mike to Marc. Maybe you sent your characters north early on, then, for logistical reasons, later decided it would be better to send them west.

Your word processor’s find-and-replace function can help with some of that, but not everything. Don’t trust yourself to keep it all straight in your head. If you need to, keep a master list of details. Map things out, create a day-and-date timeline of events.

Scouting for word repetitions. Without even realizing it, you can get much too fond of a particular word during the initial draft or subsequent layerings. And suddenly there it is, making 4 or 5 appearances on a single page. Prune 3 or 4 of ‘em, or swap ‘em out and give thanks for the thesaurus.

Reading for clarity. In the thick of writing, we know perfectly well what we mean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always come across on the page. So try reading from the perspective of someone who’s coming at the material without the benefit of living inside your head. Watch out for things like this, when specificity gets lost:

• Who do “he” and “she” refer to, when you’re moving 5 characters around a scene and it’s been a few paragraphs since you ID’d anyone by name?
• What is “it” when your character is juggling 3 different items?
• Where is “there” when you’ve referred to 2 different locations?

And watch for muddled thoughts, especially with characters’ interior tangents. A few years ago I was going through my novel Prototype in preparation for a new edition, and to my withering shame encountered a couple of places where even I couldn’t figure what I’d been trying to say before. If I couldn’t, for sure I couldn’t expect readers to divine the meaning.

Language And Rhythm: Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee

For me, at least, this is where the real fun begins. This is where the generic starts evolving into the personal, when you really start leaving your fingerprints all over your own work. You can think of it as developing your own style. I mostly just think of it as working on the things that make you sound more like yourself.

Crafting the flow. Do you read your work aloud? I do. There’s no better way to gauge how dialogue flows, and to pick up on the cadences imbedded in your prose.

For a guy who loves drone music, I’m awfully obsessed with the rhythms and poly-rhythms of language, particularly when it comes to descriptive passages, reflecting states of mind, and so on. It isn’t appropriate for every project, or every page, but when it is, syllables can be like drum beats: one too many or one too few can throw an entire passage out of balance. When I’m focused on rhythm, word choice often comes down to how things flow and sound together. Reading aloud tells me when it’s time to let it keep rolling, and when it’s time to drop the hammer of a period.

Obviously this emphasis on rhythm is going to be more apparent in an oral presentation. Even so, I’m convinced that it infiltrates the subconscious of a reasonably attentive reader; that the voice in her head that follows along picks up on the cues.

For a seasonally appropriate case study, track down a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his story “A Child’s Christmas In Wales,” and listen for the way he turns prose into music. Beautiful.

Punchier choice of words. The world is full of prose that reads as if it has as much enthusiasm for language as a technical manual for repairing an ATM. Actually, I shouldn’t slag off ATM tech manuals with reading one. Maybe they’re riveting.

Still, I don’t think the point is lost. You know the kind of prose I mean: Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, It just lies there being functional, like a beige rug. Do you want to read a beige rug? Neither do I. But it’s easy in the first draft, when you’re focused mainly on getting the story down, to relay it in a pedestrian way that lacks the arc-welding flare of real inspiration.

Some writers stop there, and get away with it. Personally, I’d rather keep working to change the beige rug into a multicolored flying carpet.

The arsenal starts with, but is far from limited to: Unique turns of phrase. Original metaphors and analogies. Dialogue that reads like it came straight over the teeth of real, live people.

Bottom line, I look for more interesting ways to say things.

For a book-length exploration of the subject that’s as entertaining as it is useful, I heartily recommend Spunk & Bite, by Arthur Plotnik. It’s an affectionate rebuttal to Strunk & White’s venerable The Elements of Style, complete with evidence that even E.B. White ignored his own advice on occasion. Here’s part of what I wrote about the book elsewhere, a few years ago:

Plotnik’s assertion is that, in a world increasingly full of distractions, with attention spans as fragmented as cable TV bandwidth, it behooves savvy writers to amplify their signals to better compete with the noise. To use language in ways that will surprise and delight the reader…

…Plotnik covers around 30 elements of language use, and cites examples from a panoply of writers and sources — effective illustrations of the chapter’s topic, usually, but he tosses in the occasional clunker, as well, so one can learn from the toppled face-plants of overreaching writers.

Fortunately, Plotnik never forgets there’s an appropriate time and place for what he advocates, and realizes there’s a fine line between energy and obnoxiousness … should inspire you to take a fresh look at your style, and if it’s been feeling anemic lately, suggests how to furnish it with a shot of adrenaline and a tank of nitrous oxide.

And that’s it for now. Back early next week, to answer the nagging question: Will this really wrap it up, or will it all spawn a Part 4?

[Photo by Casbr]

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