writing

With the second draft done, and now out with a few people to read, I thought I’d look back at how it went and what I learnt from it. Thinking about it the main lesson for me was:

If first drafts are about letting you suck, second drafts are for sorting out the story.

First drafts are a mess, that is fine and awesome and how they are meant to be, but they should give you a good idea of what you need to change. Especially when it comes to the story. A first draft will be all over the place with contradiction, plot holes you could fly spacecraft through, illogical character choices and much, much more.

The second draft, whether in the form of revising what you already have or going through a full rewrite which is what I have done, is your chance to sort out that mess. If you’ve outlined do a fresh one with all you’ve learnt from writing the first draft, and trust me you will learn a lot. Give yourself a break then re-read the first draft and see what is missing or what needs to be removed. If you have done the first draft like I have you will have a list of things you already know you will need to change, I kept a constantly updated set of notes as I went along, that you should have rightly ignored as you were writing it. You ignored them to get to the end of the first draft so you could get a view of the story as a whole.

Well now you are at that point, approach the second draft with an open mind. Take a look at the whole thing from start to finish. Ask yourself whether the beginning and ending are right, do the key events happen in a way that feels nature. Does it work as a story? Be prepared to cut what doesn’t work, even if you really like a chapter or scene. Do what is right for the story as a whole. Have those little notes you’ve kept in mind as you embark on the second draft and get to work on making the story work.

Don’t worry about getting the dialog or description right in a second draft, those can wait until the editing stage, take this chance to get the story in a state you are happy with. Get the pacing right, have your characters feel real, make sure the plot hits the correct notes and get the story finished. If you do this congratulations you will probably have a story you can be happy with when all that is done.

Then share it with people, it is no use writing anything if you keep it to yourself, as a writer you are too close to your work to make some of the judgement calls about the book. Give it to people you trust to get the feedback you need on the story. It will undoubtedly need further adjustments after the second draft but it should be minor to what has come before.

Be open and willing to accept peoples feedback, just make sure they are focused on what is and isn’t right with the story and not on the parts of the book you know aren’t finished. Read what they say, tweak the story as you need. Then you will come to perhaps the trickiest part of the whole process of writing a book, the editing phase. But that is a topic for another time.

Joss Whedon’s film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing is a bit special. And by a bit I mean it is freaking awesome. I saw it last Friday and loved every minute of it, it had me laughing throughout and the acting was perfect. It is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. You have to go watch it, go do it now. Don’t keep on reading, go see for yourselves why it is good, the rest of this post will be here for when you are back.

I sat and enjoyed every minute of the film but throughout part of my brain was pointing out lessons I could learn from how it was done, lessons that could help improve my writing.

Almost everyone learns Shakespeare at school in the UK and US, we read the books and are shown a few adaptations of them, often from the stage. Often it is looking at the words on their own, but seeing Much Ado About Nothing is a great reminder of how much of the play is not about the words, but about how it is acted. As a writer I took three main things away from watching it.

Dialog can only do so much

It seems odd as that is one of the great things about Shakespeare, his fantastic dialog, but character actions and body language add layers and other levels to what the dialog is doing, they can enhance it or reveal differences in what a character is saying and thinking.

So Benedick and Beatrice, who seem to not like each other, overhear people talking about each other and about how the other likes them. The dialog in these scenes would not do much on its own, it is the hilarious actions of both characters as they try to hear what is being said whist trying to not reveal themselves (and failing but with the characters they are overhearing pretending not to notice).

After these scenes there are others where both characters pretend nothing has changed and that they aren’t thinking about each other, but their body language and actions tell a different tale.

Words alone can only say so much, we are such an expressive species with our body language that a lot can be said without anything actually being voiced out loud. My current second draft is quite dialog heavy and this lesson is one in particular I will be bearing in mind when I go back to edit it.

How to show…

This is related to the point above but elaborates on it and looks at it from a different direction.

Because the play is so much about what is not said as much as what is, it is interesting to see how the story is moved along by this. Not much time is wasted on huge speeches or long monologues, it is a combination of sharp dialog (and plenty of puns!) along with how the characters react and their body language that reveals a lot of the depth and nuances in the story. Simple shots such as one character looking longingly at another as the dialog talks about something related to them both conveys a lot to the viewer.

Writers are often told to show not tell, to let the characters and the writing describe emotions, reactions and hidden thoughts instead of ramming it home by dialog, and this film has examples of it throughout. The whole thing could be used as an example if you really wanted to.

..and when to tell

However, on the flipside, several big events that provide bug pushes to the plot moving forward happen almost entirely off screen. There is one where one character is led to believe that his wife to be is seduced by another, and all that is shown is a flashback to them looking up at her window as he sees a silhouette of two people coming together. The scene is also alluded to in the plotting of the villain in the story, but still for something that drives the main events in the story it gets very little screen time.

Show don’t tell is often repeated as the only way to do things when the truth is you often need to tell. If you show everything you are going to end up with endless pages of descriptions for things that might not really matter to the overall story. Sometimes you need to just tell people what has happened and then let that have its effect on the story. Focus on what is important, on what the real focus of the story is, and don’t waste words on things that the reader/viewer can just be told.

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Those are the three points I took away from this film, such an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare that is definitely made by how it is filmed and by the actors that star in it. As I move into the editing stage of my book I’m going to make sure all three of the above will be ingrained in my mind and I believe all writers can learn something from them.

As I make steady progress through my second draft, it is interesting to look back at how I’ve managed to increase my daily word count goals and the reasons I have achieved that.

To start with we must go back to early last year. I’d been ‘attempting’ to write for years, but never made it far thanks to procrastination. I’d decided that it was time to get serious with it, and part of that was deciding I needed to do a little bit of work on the book every single day without fail. This was for a previous book project that was dropped as I felt the current series is a much better story overall.

So I started doing a little bit every day, first on the outline and then when it came to the actual writing I set myself the goal of 250 words a day. I did this at the same time each day, an hour set aside just to write. This was tough at first; plenty of days I would only manage around 100 words. I found it took me a while to concentrate, my attention flicking to anything else apart from my writing. I didn’t feel the creativity I thought I needed to get the words done.

But I kept going, little by little raising my word count until I hit the 250 word count goal each day. Then I raised it to 350 and then 500 once I was reaching the goal each day. What I found was that as I was doing this each day, I was getting into my stride quicker and quicker each day. The creativity was coming as well, more ideas flowing as I just did the process of writing.

That project ended after I’d done the first draft, dropped for my current series as mentioned earlier. I went straight into writing the new one with a goal of 500. Now more than halfway through the second draft my daily goal is 1400 and I’ve learnt a lot.

Having a set period of time each day to write in has helped me get in the habit, because I do it every day I’m mentally ready for it. My brain is ready to write before I’ve even put fingers to keyboard. The quality of the words I’m writing has gone up alongside the quality, and will go up further once I get an editor involved and can analyse my own flaws better.

And the creativity? That came because I gave myself the time and space to write. I tend to have ideas about the books at all times of the day and makes notes about them or email myself so I don’t forget. But the hard graft, the words and ideas that make up most of the writing, they come as I do it.

Give yourself the time and space to write and the ideas will come, the words will flow onto the page if you make it the habit it should be.