From The First Draft To The Last, Part 3

Our journey until now…

In Part 1, we started big and clumsy, with birthing a misshapen blob of story and getting its core parts in order. Part 2 covered the administrative tasks of internal logic, and the art of language and rhythm.

Now we get into the skills that you can spend a lifetime refining.

More than any other aspects of reshaping a manuscript, these processes rely on sensibilities that develop through experience. They’re about feel and instinct and balance. A sixth sense about the right time and place for something. An inherent grasp of what’s too much and what isn’t enough.

In a couple places, I’ve addressed the topics in earlier posts elsewhere. If you’re interested in burrowing deeper into these subtopics, I’ve linked to PDFs of these essays that will open in new windows. Just look for the Detour links.

The Tangled Web: Better Simplicity Through Complexity

Arguably, this is the trickiest aspect of revising, because it doesn’t involve dealing with what’s there, but instead recognizing what isn’t there and needs to be. I think of it as growing connective tissue throughout the work — a longer work like a novel, especially — providing better meshing between elements that don’t quite hang together yet.

This may include:

Things that seem shallow and need to be deepened. Imagine a novel that heavily relies on an passionate, tempestuous relationship between two characters … but it’s all just smoke and fire, never getting down into the embers that fuel the relationship. If you’re only skating the surface of something that’s supposed to resonate, go deeper. Explore and reveal the why behind the intensity, rather than expecting the reader to take your word for it.

Elements that lack clarity and need further definition. If you’re too close to your work to be objective, this is where a trusted early reader can help. If someone comes back with a report that begins, “But I don’t get why they…”, then that part probably needs another look.

Strengthening story arcs. When a lot is going on, with a disparate cast of characters off doing different things, these subplots often benefit from having their own clear beginnings, middles, and ends. It can help to mentally isolate them and think of them as standalone stories broken up and layered throughout the larger whole.

Foreshadowing and surprise. The farther we get in a work, especially a long one, the greater the likelihood is that we come up with twists and turns that seem to emerge out of nowhere. Sometimes these work as-is. Often, though, they’re outcomes that should be prepared for earlier. If not, it becomes blatant that you’re just making it up as you go along.

Detour: “The Three-Step Process To Surprising Your Readers”

Micro-tension. This is a concept I’ve recently encountered, and it really is a revelation. It’s something that agent Donald Maass discusses at length in books and blog posts. “Tension on every page,” is his mantra, with the end goal being a storyline that pulls you in early and keeps pulling you along.

Think of this as a small, underlying conflict between a character and another character, or himself, or her circumstances or surroundings. Or it may be a prevailing mood, an undercurrent of disharmony. Micro-tension doesn’t remotely imply that you’re writing a thriller. It can be subtle, applying just as well to a romance as an episode of 24.

Enough of my butchery. Seek knowledge at the source. If you don’t pick up Maass’s The Fire In Fiction, at least Google “Maass micro-tension.”

Reinforcing the theme. Sometimes it’s only when we’ve gotten to the end of the first draft that we realize what we’ve really been writing about. A crime novel turns out to be about fractured relationships between fathers and sons; a multigenerational family saga reflects changes in the national character. Armed with this understanding, you’re now in a position to go back through the manuscript and bring out the full potential of the scenes and passages that reflect this unifier.

Cutting: Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them?

If you’ve used the gut-dump approach (see part 1) for your first draft, I guarantee you that you don’t need everything you’ve ended up with. And probably with most any other approach as well. The main reason I overstock is to give myself a surplus of raw material to work with. It’s the same principle as censor-free brainstorming: generating 10 ideas to keep the best 3.

Ideally, then, subsequent drafts are going to tighten up and get shorter. While that’s an oversimplification — we’ve seen above that there may be places that need to be further beefed up — it’s likely there will be even more places that can benefit from nipping, tucking, cutting, and compression.

In his most excellent On Writing, Stephen King shares a formula that an editor sent back to him with an early rejection:

Second draft = First draft — 10%

Einstein couldn’t have made that more elegant. And then there’s William Faulkner’s admonition:

“Kill your darlings.”

Not surprisingly, people have floated different interpretations of this. I’ve always taken it to refer to the stuff that’s there for no greater purpose than to tell people, “Hey, look how good I’m writing!”

Detour: “The Delete Key: The Published Writer’s Best Friend”

Just Over The Horizon…

Yup, things have gone fractal again. Two parts became three, and now three have become four.

But there it shall end. With a look at the editorial process and why, for me at least, “final draft” is only a temporary state, Part 4 will definitely bring this series home and put it to bed.

Stay tuned.

[Photo by cybershotking]

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