From Idea to Story: Part Five

From Idea to Story: Part Four How to Structure your Novel

From Idea to Story: Part Five

If you’re still with me all these weeks later, well done! I hope you have been finding my suggestions helpful and even been able to start work on a story of your own.

This week, we’re going to look at what you need to do after your have that first draft or outline in hand.

Start with what you’ve got

Some of you may have written a bare-bones summary of the story. Others will have written as complete a draft as possible. I fall into the latter category. I like having as much of the story written as possible. With the first draft, I can let my imagination run wild. This is when the story surprises me, when characters develop minds of their own, and when the plot turns in directions I never expected.

But there’s nothing wrong with taking the other road. as long as it’s as comprehensive in detail as possible. The more holes you leave in the plot, the harder draft 2 becomes.

One thing a lot of new writers have in common is a tendency to write themselves into a corner and then not know how to get out of it. For instance, when William Goldman was writing ‘The Princess Bride’, he one day found himself writing the words Westley was dead. No! he thought to himself. How could Westley, the hero, be dead? For days, Goldman couldn’t bare to go back to the story. Eventually, he pulled himself up by the (medieval) boot laces and returned to the story. And guess what? It turned out that Westley was only mostly dead.

My point is that even old salts like Goldman could write himself into a corner. And his reaction, like mine, like yours, was that same sense of anguish and frustration. The thing is, after you have your meltdown — and you will have a meltdown — get back on the horse. Uh, in the saddle. No, at the desk. That’s it. Get back to your desk and work your way through it. Perhaps you need to rewrite that scene that led to your being stuck. Or perhaps you can come up with a creative solution.

If you have a sticky spot in your story, perhaps you decided to just leave it and figure it out later. Sometimes that’s for the best. But draft #2 is where you have to fix all those boo-boos, if boo-boos they are. So, here’s where the work really begins:

Read the draft

Don’t expect much. This is more of a road map than a clear and concise story. But now at least you have something to work from.

A word of caution: Do not waste time on grammar or spelling at this stage. Yes, both are very important, but this isn’t the place for it. After all, you have a lot of rewriting to do, and some of those carefully edited pages may end up being cut. Wait until later.

Read with a pen and notebook in your hand. Make notes of things that you like or bits that you hate. Make notes for additions and deletions. Use colour coding if that helps. I tend to turn my fonts red when something needs to be deleted. Green for new passages. Or, if a paragraph or chapter is good, but in the wrong place, I’ll turn the font blue. Then purple for any bits that need further research. Keeping notes about what you need to do next is invaluable.

When you get to the end of that first draft do two things:

Celebrate! You wrote a first draft of a story, congratulations! Yes, it was hard work, but you deserve a breather before you move on to stage two.Save that first draft as a new draft. I usually will save this document as: Title / Draft # / Date. It’s not unusual for me to end up with five or six drafts of a story, so keeping each one separate is an important way of knowing which version I’m working on.

An optional third step:

Set the manuscript aside to ‘breathe’ and either start to research all the items that you have on your list, or just start writing something else.

There’s a lot to be said for leaving the story for a couple of weeks at least so you can return to it with fresh eyes. However, I prefer to wait until I have that second draft finished before I set the story aside. Right now there is too much muddle in the manuscript, and I find it frustrating to just leave it. However, the choice is yours.

Start work on draft two

Generally, I will start work on the now very messy draft that I have saved from the original. If you prefer to work more cleanly, you can print off that original draft and start writing afresh by transcribing the good bits, and skipping the to-be-deleted parts.

One reason I prefer to work from a copy of the muddy first draft is that I enjoy seeing order come out of the mess. Deleting all those red bits is, in my opinion, good for the soul. Adding in those new scenes also makes me feel good about making progress.

Where it gets tricky is when you have to move passages from one place to another. To give you an example from my current work in progress:

The story is primarily set in a psychiatric hospital at the end of the 19th century. Initially, I had the action at the hospital begin at the bedside of a dying man. I had added a note to myself that I should describe the ward first. This I did in the rewrite. Then, moving on, I realised this scene had to come earlier in the story. I consequently had to move the paragraph about the hospital up a few pages. This sort of constantly developing the story is fairly common, or, at least, it is for me.

Add the new scenes

You may have already written these new scenes, many writers like to as soon as they realise something is missing. I tend to wait until I am working on the rewrite because I want to be sure the writing follows seamlessly from whatever preceded it. For instance, if the previous paragraph was from the point of view of one character, you might want to continue that with the new part. Then again, perhaps this paragraph contradicts what came immediately before it. It’s up to you how you handle it, of course, but if you write your additional scenes separately you may need to edit them on the rewrite.

Adding the Research

This part can be tricky. Many very talented writers can’t help but signpost how hard they’ve worked to get all the research done. You want to make the information flow as smoothly as you can. You also want to be sure that everything you are reporting is correct. How do you do it? Well, there are three possibilities:

Just add it as a new paragraph. Something like this: They parked on one of the side streets and walked through the ancient entrances of York. The city was founded in 71AD by the Romans. They called it Eboracum, meaning Yew Tree etc., etc. This is what we call ‘information dumping.’ This is only a few sentences, so you might get away with it, but imagine if it went on for a long paragraph. Or, worse, several pages. Inelegant, to say the least.Put it into the thoughts of a character: Jake had always wanted to visit York and now he was here. It was even more magical, historical, and mysterious than all his books had led him to expect. To think, the Romans walked these streets way back in 71AD. Of course, they called it Eboracum meaning Yew Tree. Jake wondered where all the yew trees had gone. I think you’ll agree that’s a lot more palatable.Put it into dialogue. You could, for instance, make Jake very enthusiastic and eager to share what he knows with his girlfriend, or perhaps he’s the know-it-all type.In my novels which take the form of diaries written by Sherlock Holmes, it can be tricky to insert important background information. One way of doing it is by having my hero comment on something for instance, I hear that Scotland Yard is setting up a fingerprint bureau some time this year. I’m frankly incredulous that it has taken them so long...However, since some things require more in-depth information, I add historical notes to the end of the book, so the reader has access to pertinent information if they want it.By the end of the second draft

By now you should have a clean, tidy, and clear story with everything in its right place. Now is the time to set the manuscript aside for a few weeks; a couple of months is even better. By the time you reach this stage you have been living with this story for months or even longer. You may think you know every word of it, but the amount of blindness authors develop when it comes to their writing is amazing. One novel I was working on passed through my hands at least five times. Then two Beta readers. Then an editor. Once I’d finished making all the revisions these clever people suggested, guess what: yes, I still found a handful of boo-boos when I did my final read through.

After you’ve let the manuscript cool for a while, come back to it with fresh eyes. Repeat your actions for the first draft: add notes, fix mistakes, and reword any clunky sentences. Don’t be surprised if you have to repeat this at least a couple more times. Don’t be put off by it, either. The fact that you’re still correcting errors means only that you’re a perfectionist. You can fix your grammar and spelling around now, too.

What next? Find a Beta reader. Look for an agent / publisher, or investigate self-publishing. But the big thing is this: Blow your trumpet, my friend, you wrote a book!

Next week, I”ll look at the structure of the novel and what you should be aware of.

Also, if you have any questions, post them in the comments section, and I’ll try to answer them.

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Published on February 13, 2024 22:31

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