A FEW YEARS BACK, I was stuck on a novel, so I checked myself into the idyllic Weymouth Center for a week of concentrated work.
Setting up a work area in my room, I noticed the wastebasket contained some cast-off manuscript pages from the writer who had preceded me. I love any excuse to procrastinate, so I fished them out for a quick look and realized they were two versions of the same chapter. Version one was obviously rough draft, probably pounded out on the fly. I saw lots of brackets, like this: [DESCRIPTIVE PHRASE] or [SOMETHING HERE]. Placeholder words stood out in all caps, sometimes followed by lists of synonyms. There were “notes to self”–– [IS DOG IN OR OUT?] or [WHAT'S LOCATION?] or [GUN INSTEAD OF KNIFE?].
Yes, it was messy. But what really struck me was the raw energy and power of what I was reading. Who was this writer? I wondered.
Then I flipped on to the revised pages. What a let down. No longer raw, the style had lost its brashness and verve. Many of the words that had made it sizzle were replaced by more formal “literary” language. Rough idiomatic sentence––interesting in the way they revealed a character in the writing––had been smoothed into patterns that were textbook-correct, but no longer true to the narrative voice of the main character, or in a wider sense the writer herself.
Has this ever happened to you? Has one of your trusted readers remarked, “You know, I liked it better before”––and this after you’ve labored so mightily to revise and polish it to literary perfection?
Here’s writing guru Peter Elbow (in Writing with Power):
“People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in speaking… We have so little practice in writing, but so much more time to stop and fiddle as we write each sentence.”
I realize Elbow is talking about an even worse phenomenon, the urge to instantly revise and “perfect” your rough draft, even as it steams out of your imagination. But the principle is the same:
“Natural breath,” in a passage of writing, as in a human being, is the cardinal sign of life. If it breathes, it’s alive. What do we aspire to in writing, if not the same level of reader engagement we strive for in a listener when we speak?
For a moment, think of your reader as a listener. If you spoke that piece of revision to someone, in conversation, would you see interest, engagement flickering in her face?
Do this: record a passage––read it aloud yourself, or get someone else to read it. Wait a while, then listen to the playback. If it sounds flat, put your text away and improvise the passage. (Sometimes you get the most “conversational” result by talking it to someone–a friend, or your “trusted reader.”)
Record this version, then transcribe it. Put the two versions side by side and compare. Rough as it might be, is the transcription fresher, more fun to read than the original?
If so…what did you do right?
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Really struggling with the whole idea of a first draft at the moment Bill. I’m trying to work my way through a first draft but the feeling is one of being caught in the dark without a torch. Every thousand words or so I just want to run back towards the light again. What do you think you should aim to achieve with your first draft?
Mark: having struggled with the same darkness, I would say you should aim to finish, at all costs. I know all the arguments for quality–strong structure, robust arcs, achieving thematic coherence and meaning, etc.–but all of them crumble away in the face of an unfinished edifice. Nanowrimo is not a perfect experience by any means, but it’s based on a sound idea–just get there. Reach the far shore. Francis Ford Coppola said somewhere, the key to a project is a finished first draft. When I first saw that notion, I thought, well, duh. Then I spent some time in movieland and saw the reality behind his thinking–there were so many treatments, so much talk, so many great openings-plus-synopsis-of-rest. But projects set into motion on anything less than a “finished first draft” were too often destined for great difficulty, if not doom. (Coppola, by the way, knew this from excruciating experience.)
If you simply can’t move forward–that is, the darkness is so thick and total that it mocks your every attempt–it may be time to try another way into your material. Often you’re missing some key piece of story anatomy, or placing your focus in the wrong places, etc. Underlying these symptoms there’s almost always a dearth of deep character knowledge, a need to coax new material, new possibilities out of your raw, unfiltered unconscious. It’s not easy, but it’s amazing how much just a little success with this process will re-energize you, maybe even give you the torch you need.
Bill, reading your prior post on 100-word fictions and your advice here, perhaps a great exercise would be writing 100-word fictions from the rest of the novel to “coax new material,” as you say. For my current novel, I have a whole list of back story moments I need to envision, though I doubt any of them will become actual scenes. It’s tough to sit down and generate pages I’ll just file, but I figure, why not put the out-takes on the blog some day, or better yet, understand I must make the final work stand on solid, invisible iceberg.
Lyn, I guess the 100 word story approach can be a way in to a larger work. It has never occurred to me to do that, but I suppose it falls into the “whatever works for you” classification. There are many ways to engage one’s unconscious–which is really what we’re talking about–and if chipping off pieces of that task as 100 word fictions does it for you, go for it.
As for the daunting prospect of writing pages of stuff you’ll never use, I think the problem may be in your deep assumption that writing should find a place in the larger work, or why do it. My answer is pretty simple: it’s not writing. That is, writing your way to a deeper understanding of a character–or of a “game changing” moment in that character’s life–is actually form of thinking. And for some folks (I’m one) it WAY more productive a form of thinking, more purpose driven forms, as in: “We need to know why he throws the glass into the fireplace. Let’s make a list possible of possible reasons…” That is a game my creative unconscious has no interest in playing.
But my point: if you change your attitude toward those pages you think you’ll only “file,” you might just develop not only a tolerance for the process, but a yen for it. Remember the mantra: “I’m not writing, I’m thinking.” And when the jewels appear suddenly in what seems like a pointless flow of garbage writing, you’ll see what I mean. And the fact that you wrote 8 random-seeming pages to get them won’t matter. In fact, I’ll be you won’t even feel you have to file them. You got what you wanted. Take it, be thankful, and throw the now-useless husks away.
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