Second time around

Now that I’ve started rewrites on my NaNoW­riMo ’06 project, I thought this might be a good time to describe my approach to fic­tion. This is by no means the only way or even the “right” way to write fic­tion, it’s just what works best for me.

For the first draft, best writ­ten for NaNoW­riMo with reck­less aban­don, I take to heart Stephen King’s con­cept of sto­ries as fos­sils, found things in the ground. The writer’s job is to dig up the fos­sil so its shape is vis­i­ble and rec­og­niz­able while break­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. With that in mind, I start with an idea, a few char­ac­ters and a vague sense of where I want to end up and start writ­ing. The story twists and turns, tries to buck me off and I wan­der down a blind alley or three that go nowhere and force me to pre­tend they didn’t hap­pen and start over at an ear­lier point in the tale, but I usu­ally end up with a work­able first draft this way. It’s not read­able by any­one but me, and vast swaths of it even lack punc­tu­a­tion, much less per­fect spelling, as those parts were typed lit­er­ally with my eyes closed as fast I could go. This is what I fin­ished three Novem­bers ago with Home­world, my Mars novel.

A few weeks ago, I started read­ing back through that first draft, rein­tro­duc­ing myself to the story and char­ac­ters. Two years may seem like a long time to let a story lie fal­low, but it took that long for me to get enough dis­tance from it to approach it again with fresh eyes. Reread­ing the story as a new reader I was by turns impressed and hor­ri­fied at what I’d writ­ten. Some parts were great, oth­ers not so much. But the story beneath the telling was just as amaz­ing as I’d remembered.

As I went through the first draft, I jot­ted down the major scenes, just sim­ple reminders of what each scene was about. Like:

Bev is attacked by a space aard­vark. The crew dri­ves it away with Nerf bats.

(no, that’s not a real scene from the book)

This gives me a very loose out­line (no Roman numer­als here, despite what you were taught in school) for the sec­ond draft. Just a beat by beat sum­mary of what happens.

Then, with the char­ac­ters and their voices firmly in mind, I start the sec­ond draft. This is com­plete draft, tak­ing noth­ing from the first other than the vague out­line. I’m rewrit­ing every word over again. And, as you might expect after a sep­a­ra­tion of two years, the sec­ond draft is dif­fer­ent. So far there are things I pre­fer in the new draft over what I wrote orig­i­nally, and there are things I think I did bet­ter the first time.

When I’m done with this draft, which will also be the first truly com­plete draft since the first draft got stuck in act 3, I’ll go back over both drafts and com­pare them scene by scene, and merge the best parts of each into draft num­ber 3. After that, I’ll go back over the third draft for style, con­ti­nu­ity, and then finally give the whole thing another pol­ish to reduce word count as much as I pos­si­bly can, shoot­ing for 80 – 85% the length of draft num­ber 3, the com­bined version.

That’s the plan. For those of you work­ing nov­el­ists out there (pub­lished or not), how does this com­pare with your process?

Update: Fit­tingly (or iron­i­cally, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive) for an arti­cle about sec­ond drafts, I for­got to men­tion a few things on the first run through. Specif­i­cally, I told you what I do, but not why. Which is kinda important.

The out­line process between drafts one and two is vital. While the first draft is all about cre­ative aban­don, the out­line process is where I take the key ele­ments of the story, rearrange and oth­er­wise change them as nec­es­sary, and then reassem­ble them into a nar­ra­tive struc­ture that makes sense. This is where I find and plug plot holes, uncon­vinc­ing char­ac­ter moti­va­tion, etc. When I start on the sec­ond draft, I’m secure in the knowl­edge that the story is solid. This is also where I get to do a lot of fore­shad­ow­ing, since I know what’s com­ing up, knowl­edge I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily have in the first draft. But unlike draft num­ber three, which is about style and craft, draft two is still about story, which is why I start over from scratch. There’s still room for sur­prises, but over an under­ly­ing struc­ture rather than out of nowhere.