Discovery Drafting

Every time I write a book, I have to learn how to do it all over again. I panic every damn time. One of the hardest things to remember is that I don’t really know what the book is about until I start writing. That is, my first (and second and third and fourth and . . ) draft is a discovery draft. I don’t know what I’m writing about until I see what I say.

This is really difficult for well-organized people (aka control freaks, aka me) to grasp. We know story structure, we know what the story’s about, we’ve done character discovery and mapped out the territory, we know all of that stuff. At the point where we sit down to write, shouldn’t it just be filling in the blanks?

The problem is, if you just fill in the blanks, the story’s dead. I think story is a living thing, buried in your subconscious, and when you raise it to the surface, it hits the air and changes, it absorbs everything around it, and becomes something new and alive. But if you don’t let it rise, if you put a brick on top of it and smother it with rules and plans, it’s always going to be something you constructed, not something you watched grow and blossom. You use rules and plans to rewrite, not to write.

That why the first draft has to be discovery draft, the draft that’s for only you to see, the draft where you can do anything you want. I started writing two nights ago, and my first knee jerk reaction was, “My god, this is lousy.” And then sanity reasserted itself: “Of course, it’s lousy, It’s first draft. First drafts are always lousy.” It’s a discovery draft. (My other term for this is the “don’t look down” draft, based in equal parts on something Ron Carlson said and on Wile E. Coyote, who runs off a cliff and is doing just fine. Then he looks down, realizes he’s on thin air, somebody hands him an anvil, and he’s done. Don’t Look Down, people.)

The second night, I went in and reread it, and it’s not good, but it’s not lousy, so I picked up and went on, and sure enough, I reached the end of a very bad scene, and thought, “That’s not going to work, that’s terrible.” But then analyzing why it was terrible showed me that I was undercutting my antagonist, making him a joke instead of a real threat. He wasn’t a character on the page yet, I hadn’t given him room to breathe, but I hadn’t realized that until I wrote him. Thank god for discovery drafts.

And then there was the supporting character I couldn’t quite figure out how to write. There was some complex layering there, foreshadowing I needed to get in, and I’d come up with any number of possible solutions, but when I started to write her, she was just there, the solution popped up on its own, and I thought, Of course. You can plan characters all you want, but you don’t really find them until you start the discovery draft.

That’s even true of character you think you know. I had done massive discovery work on my protagonist, but I still didn’t have her; I knew she was cheerful, pragmatic, and unflappable, but I didn’t know what that meant. Was she just going to smile through the whole damn book? Then at about 2AM that first night, I wrote this:

It was a beautiful clear night, so she was making good time past Phil’s shuttered pool hall when somebody grabbed her arm and threw her hard against the building.

“You owe me,” Joe Hinch snarled, taking a step toward her, and then he crumpled to the ground, revealing Harry McNally standing him behind him with a cosh.

“I’m going to say this one more time,” Cat said. “I can handle this myself.”

“You know, a lady would say thank you,” Harry said.

“Well, if that’s what you’re after, go save a lady.”

and there she was. “Unflappable” didn’t mean Pollyanna, it meant she stood her ground and didn’t flap. That’s a protagonist I can work with. (Yes, I know it’s lousy. I’ll fix it. It’s a discovery draft.)

Joe up there is the bad antagonist, bad in the sense that he’s just a snarling mugger. When I rewrote it, I gave him more of a chance:

It was a beautiful clear night, so she was making good time past Phil’s shuttered pool hall when somebody grabbed her arm and threw her hard against the building.

“You owe me,” Joe Hinch snarled, taking a step toward her.

Cat straightened and shook out her coat. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? What did Phil tell you about not touching the waitresses?”

Hinch said, “That’s in the restaurant,” and grabbed her arm.

“Okay, that’s fair,” Cat said and drew back her elbow to slam it into his throat when he crumpled to the ground, revealing Harry McNally standing him behind him with a cosh.

“I’m going to say this one more time,” Cat said. “I can handle this myself.”

“You know, a lady would say thank you,” Harry said.

“Well, if that’s what you’re after, go save a lady.”

Yeah, he still needs more work. Discovery draft, though. It’s working.

I was also having trouble with Phil Blight, the main antagonist for this story, a crime boss in the worst part of town. I wanted people to like him, but I wanted him to be a ruthless son of a bitch. The two traits didn’t seem compatible, and I was trying way too hard with him (he roared with laughter once and that’s when I knew I was grasping at cliches) and then this turned up as Phil warns Harry to stay away from Cat:

“I read the sign,” Harry said to Phil. “No touching the waitresses.”

“That’s for here in the Ear. What I’m telling you is, not outside of the Ear neither. Cat’s like a daughter to me. I been watching over her since she was twelve.”

“What happened when she was twelve?”

“I killed her father.”

Harry nodded. “And you drink the beer this woman brings you?”

“He was a bastard,” Phil said. “She was probably glad to see him go. Didn’t shed a tear at the funeral.”

“You went.”

“Course I went. It’s Monday Street. We pay our respects.”

“Right,” Harry said. “I will stay away from Cat.”

That’s too raw to stay as it is, but it won’t, it’s discovery draft. What it does give me is my way into Phil, so in that sense, it’s a huge success.

I mention all of this because I’m just re-discovering it (slow-learner here), but also because NaNoWriMo starts this Saturday. NaNo is basically a month of people all over the world writing discovery drafts together–that should cause a disturbance in the Force–and reporting their progress in word counts. (Lani Diane Rich’s first book was started in Nano, and it was also the first NaNo book published.) If you’ve been looking for a way to start a discovery draft, NaNo can be great because it doesn’t care how good your words are, just that you produce words, which means you’re practicing slinging those words onto the screen without second-guessing yourself about quality. It’s all quantity. You’ll have to rewrite, of course, but you can’t rewrite until you have words on the page to change, and NaNo gives you that.

The thing about discovery drafts is that they can be enormous fun once you put in a sock in your internal editor. Like all the other forms of discovery, they’re play, stuff that you’re doing not to create product–your discovery drafts are not going to be good enough to be published, accept that–but to find out about the story you’re creating. Once you can tell yourself, “discovery draft, don’t look down,” every time you start to panic, you’re on your way.

Oh, and here’s Phil’s composite. I like him, but he kills too many people: