Articles, projects, theories, and processes.
“The first draft of anything is shit”
Hemingway via Samuelson?
A short explanation: No writer will produce a perfect first draft. Instead, we do our best in the first draft and then polish (or reconstruct) in editing/rewriting.
So your first draft is totally allowed to be shit. Beautiful flowers grow from shit…..
“Everybody in this book was failed people. They all had all these extreme problems, and whatever they tried to do, they failed over and over again. Except for the villain. He always managed to do what he wanted. Totally believable. NOT! All people in this story were dysfunctional incompetents and failed idiots! Steer clear!”
/Mary Sue
While editing my current WIP (work in progress) for size, I’ve noticed a pattern when I introduce new characters. It starts with a long list of the characters, how they look, who they are, their backstory, and on and on. Then, after about a page, or three, they start acting.
Formalized, it could be a bit like this:
[[Introducing the setting]]
[[Introducing Character A]]
[[Introducing Character B]]
[[Introducing Character C]]
[[Ooops where's the POV character in all this and what are they up to?]]
[[End of info dump]]
Character A did something amazing and said: "Blah blah blah."
"No really?" said Character B.
Character C scoffed.So, part from trimming any excess fat from any part of this first draft scene (that isn’t supposed to be great from the start anyway—Hemingway said so!) I can rearrange it in this way:
[[Introducing the setting AND where's the POV character and what are they up to?]]
[[Introducing Character A]] who did something amazing and said: "Blah blah blah."
"No really?" said Character B. [[Introducing Character B]]
[[Introducing Character C]] who scoffed.It can still be info-dumpey, but this way the story engine gets to rev up, hopefully not even halfway down page 1 of this scene. (And yes, I know, it should rev up in the first sentence or at the very latest in the first paragraph, but I have to leave something for draft 3, 4 and 5, right?)
This becomes even more efficient if character A and B spend a page talking, and only then does character C step in. Character C doesn’t have to be introduced before that point.
A variant would be to limit the initial introductions to at most a sentence, and then add more later in the scene.
In regard to backstory, only add what is vitally important only exactly when it’s needed. So if not all backstory is vitally important, move it to the character profile document for possible use later (unless it should always stay under the surface…)
When talking about the craft of writing, one piece of information regarding techniques and advice is more fundamental than many others: Where on the scale from first idea to final book does this piece of information or advice belong?
The scale loosely:
You may also have a bunch of drafts from a beta reader process.
A book is very different when it is a first draft to be edited and when it is a published work to undergo literary analysis.
Advice that is perfectly reasonable for a final book may be totally inappropriate for a first draft.
A first draft really only have to exist (or more bluntly, it’s always going to be shit in need of editing). Applying the whole “what must exist in a good piece of literature” to a first draft or even before sitting down to write one just risks deadlocking the writing process and cause anxiety and anguish.
Once you know if the advice or technique speaks of the draft, the finished work, the editing, the ideas phase or whatever else, you also know when to apply it, if it is important for you right now, or maybe even more importantly, if it’s something you want to use at all.
One important discussion is what should happen between ideas and the first draft. Should anything happen (outlining) or should the first draft come purely from ideas (seats of pants) and then be edited into something that seems very planned?
This one depends on who you are as a writer. I’ve landed in that how “quick” your creative engine is will be one important factor. If you can switch it on and off, jump between scenes in the story with it without problem, then outlining may be for you. If, on the other hand, it’s like a hundred-car train that need a lot of effort to get going and then will keep going no matter what and no matter where, then seat-of-the-pants may be more your style.
Many years ago, I was working in a project with two programmers from London. These guys, being monolingual, were of the firm conviction that your verbal proficiency indicated competence, intelligence and ability to deal with… well language.
They called my attempts at English “Yoda English” so when the time came to add texts to the app we were building one of the Brits were put on the task.
The customer was not happy.
See, the language in question was not English but Swedish and having someone that didn’t understand a single word of Swedish do the language management produced one of my favorite misspellings of a Swedish word.
The guy had entered “gödkanna” where he should have entered “godkänna”.
Godkänna means “approve” or “confirm”.
Gödkanna doesn’t really exist in a dictionary, but it is a grammatically correct word since it’s possible to construct compound words in many different ways in Swedish (yes every writing app programmer on planet Earth, you heard me right! If you want to create a list of all possible Swedish words aspell-style, it’ll probably be a pretty long list—like listing all possible positive integers…—the local dictionary on my Mac currently contains a whopping 3404 “unknown” Swedish words… 😐)
Anyway, “gödkanna” is a compound of “göd” here used as a prefix relating to “göda” meaning fertilize and “kanna” meaning can/pitcher.
Fertilizer can.
A can of shit?
(As a parenthesis; at this writing, Google Translate suggests “manure can” as a translation of “gödkanna”…)
The customer being in Telecom, it is correct to assume they did not want to pay for a can of manure…
A key ingredient to a good story is to make sure your antagonist is fantastic. They need to be stronger than the protagonist, they need to evoke empathy in the reader, and they need to have a believable plan.
To give the antagonist a great plan, ask “what will the positive consequences of the antagonist’s plan be, if they are successful?”
Yes, you heard right. The positive effects of the villain’s plan.
There are several types of conflicts where this isn’t hard to answer. If the villain and the hero are competing against each other in some form of zero-sum game, then the villain will be the winner if their plan succeeds.
If you can convince your reader that the villain believe in their plan, and believe it will make some part of the world or their world a better place, the reader will believe in the villain and their plan, and while they might not agree at all, they’ll understand where the plan comes from, and that understanding is crucial to believing in the antagonist.
Of course, if you want to go into very deep water with a villain that for instance decides to solve global warming by killing off half the population, you have a much harder work to both motivate the villain’s thinking and keep them empathetic to the reader.
I think the most important function of an antagonist is to show that however evil they are, what they do falls within the boundaries of the human condition. Given the right circumstances, it could be you or me. And it is in exactly that point of doubt the greatest chills from a fantastic antagonist comes.
If you want to write a good story, convince the reader they could be the victim of the murderer. If you want to write a fantastic story, convince them they could be the murderer.
Then, of course, the final step is to use story and the story world to show the reader why they would not want to be the murderer by showing the consequences of being a villain. The villain is, after all, the antagonist of the story.
In an anti-abortion state, a man spits on the floor. A cleaner cleans it up using bleach and gets sentenced to 6 months for Crimes Against DNA. State Supreme Court Justice Handelson Blurb explains, “the DNA in spit is viable for at least 6 hours, so destroying it before that time has passed is defined by state law as a Crime Against DNA.”
The Justice then gets excited, “we’re just now examining the feasibility of DNA in excrement, and my hope is that we’ll have an anti-flush law in place before the end of this year. We were put on this green earth to Safeguard All of God’s Creation. DNA is no exception!”
In short, writing a novel consists of the following steps/phases/whatever you want to call them, hurdles?:
Not to mention marketing a novel or a career, regardless of if you are self-publishing or working with a publisher/agent.
Today, I’m focusing on step 2 and 3.
I’ve seen some interesting questions from people struggling with their first draft. The interesting thing about these questions is that they are seldom “first draft questions” in the sense they are questions about how to perfect the text in a time when perfection will be your enemy.
I once read a book (I think it was by Sanaya Roman) about how we avoid being successful by piling on enough hard tasks that it will be impossible to change.
Let’s say you decide to quit smoking. Your devious mind, all against change, suggests, if you really want to be healthy you need to eat better as well, and exercise, and hey, it’s healthy with social interactions, join a club or two, and that garage needs fixing too. Now that you’ve decided to become a better person, let’s add the garage and the garden to the list as well.
You quickly decide quitting smoking seems like a major task, and maybe you could postpone it a bit.
While writing a novel is hardly like quitting smoking, it is a change in its own way. You may very well fear what would happen if you became a famous bestseller and had fans chasing you down the street, or maybe more commonly nobody wanted to read what you wrote, and it was in fact crap even though it seems so great right now in your head.
Your mind will want to protect you against that change, just like any other change.
One way to do that is to claim the first draft must be PERFECT or you might as well quit right now.
Hence, all the questions about proper verb usage, dialog writing, theme, tension, style, etc. etc.
We worry about the details in order to prevent ourselves from finishing the first draft and risking realizing that it is crap and useless and no good and by no means ready for publication.
Now the hard truth. But for it to sink in properly, I give you a quote from Hemingway himself:
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
Hemingway via Arnold Samuelson
That’s a bit harsh, but what it really means is that in order to have a text ready for publication, you’ll have to edit it into shape after the first draft is finished.
Others have also said, writing is rewriting, and you can’t edit an empty page.
So, rather than worrying about the text not being perfect in the first draft (or God forbid, sending your unedited first draft to a publisher or agent assuming you’re no good when they won’t reply or send you a form mail back) you produce a first draft that stinks seven ways to Sunday, and then you edit it, rewrite it, and polish it until you’ve removed everything from that slab that wasn’t David.
Here’s another quote if you feel the above one is unkind to your newborn first draft:
“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”
Jane Smiley
This, of course, is not true for the final novel, but without a first draft you have nothing to edit into a final novel.
In the second draft of my current WIP, my characters nod about once every second page.
I found this out by looking at statistics in Scrivener. The second draft is 233k words (yes huge, I’m working on getting it down to somewhere closer to 150k right now). Of those, about 575 words are nods of different types. Nodding is in fact the most common word in the WIP.
However, this is statistics. How bad is it really on the page? For me, having been around the text for years, that may be hard to figure out. For a beta reader, they may get irritated by the text without really understanding why.
It is, nevertheless, important to separate statistics from the actual experience of the text. Maybe this is no problem at all? Or is it a subconscious showstopper? Maybe every person reading the text will see nothing but the nods. And heads will be rolling? (Pun intended…)
Regardless, looking into fixing some of these nods should improve the text, even if not taking care of them at all might not kill the text.
So how do we take care of the nods?
The simple answer to getting rid of all the nods is, of course, to replace them with other actions, and to replace with many different actions.
That’s simpler said than done, of course, but there are help out there.
I mulled this over for some months and realized I already had the resource to fix this on my computer.
My solution is spelled, “The Emotion Thesaurus,” by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. There may be other resources like it out there, but this is invaluable for this problem.
However, and there is an important however, you need the PDF-version to make this work. (Though the PDF-version is really cheap—$7 as of this writing—so I suggest you get it).
You need the PDF-version because my solution to this problem is to search for “nod” (or whatever other thing your characters do) and work backwards to find synonym actions. More about this below.
The Emotion Thesaurus is a list of emotions (anger, fear, happiness) defined by their corresponding physical signals and behaviors, internal sensations and mental responses. There are also sections on long-term responses and signs the emotion is being suppressed. Among a few other things.
As I stated above, in order to come up with alternatives to nodding, I searched my PDF-copy of the Emotion Thesaurus for “nod” and a list of sections (emotions) came up.
There seems to be a use for “nodding” in a large proportion of emotions, so the next step is to try to determine what the character is really feeling in every scene where there is nodding.
In one scene, my POV-character comes back from a negotiation, having to tell her boss (the president of a far future sci-fi nation) that they didn’t get all they bargained for, and he’d been pretty mad about that before, even calling them traitors. So here’s the original:
He pressed his lips together but then nodded. "We knew it was a tough starting bid."
Things that seem to fit in this scene are:
I did a first, quick filtering out of things like admiration, gratitude and self-loathing since it was not at all what the character felt at that moment. Then checked each potential entry for what it was about (not being a native English speaker sometimes require some effort on that front) and how the nod was being used to figure out if it was a good replacement or not.
In my case, I decided the best emotion was acceptance. The thesaurus had just “nodding” as one physical behavior for acceptance.
The president was accepting that the bid didn’t get through, deciding it wasn’t really that big a deal. My POV-character thought as much, and she too was happy to see him giving up that notion.
The text had already been down the road of the president getting pissed on the negotiations, and besides, he had other things on his mind in this scene, so… acceptance seemed to be the best emotion.
For acceptance, there are a number of possible physical actions that could replace nodding:
I picked the first one but shortened it down to the person just relaxing.
He pressed his lips together but then relaxed. "We knew it was a tough starting bid."
The text already contains a piece of dialog equivalent to the character accepting the situation, so the nod was only there from the start to add some body to dialog. Now I get the same result with another type of physical response instead.
Sidenote: Yes, that sentence actually shows and then tells, in a way. Maybe in a future round of editing, I’ll decide to change the dialog to something else. I’ve come to realize, doing editing, that my texts will likely always have issues even if they get printed. I think I’m suffering from perfectionism…
If the person nodding is a POV-character, there are also internal sensations like the chest loosening or feeling lighter and mental responses like being cautiously optimistic.
Of course, had this been a POV-character, I might also have used a thought or two on the matter. Without thoughts or dialog, things would otherwise have become pretty confusing. But also adding a physical response adds to the section and for a non POV-character dialog, action or body language is pretty much all there is.
Finally, I’d like to add that right now I am not editing the WIP for nods. In fact, I am working on its size.
Editing for word usage will, in my current plan of editing (that I hope to be able to post about some day) be the final step of polishing among several steps going from an overall analysis of the text (is it even readable?) through the structure of the text (distribution of acts and plot points) and characters to looking at scenes and finally details like paragraphs, sentences and words in the very end (where I may have had to remove both scenes, plots and characters because they didn’t work—it’s easier to kill a darling if you haven’t spent months coddling it…)
Ain’t that great?
It ain’t that great…
Talkwards 