Coming off the recent completion of my fourth revision of my reimagination of Conrad’s the Secret Agent and a full day writer’s workshop presented by the Pocono Liar’s Club, I wanted to take some time to consider my own writing process.
In addition to these two things, over the past almost year, I’ve been engaged with fellow writers through the Greater Lehigh Valley Writer’s Group, their Writer’s Cafe group, a small fledgling group at the Nazareth Library, and a few people I’ve met that meet weekly to work on craft. There are also the people from the Tolkien Society and that side of my writing world and I stalk many writing related groups on Reddit.
What I have learned about my writing I think can be distilled to the fact that I simply don’t write to write. I am a purpose driven writer. While every story has something to say, what I write has to have meaning to me and a purpose to share it. I wrote about the Liar’s Club Workshop as a public thank you for their effort, along with recognition to the speakers, and as a way to revisit my notes, takeaways, and consider how I can use what I learned.
The workshop supported what I’ve experienced in the past – the exercises conducted at workshops are painfully challenging to me. I can’t just start writing for the most part. The blank piece of paper looks at me and I look back with no purpose and got nothing to say.
It doesn’t mean the workshops don’t benefit me. I did use a piece I had started, but didn’t get very far with and it might make for a decent short story. There was also a prompt related to a character encountering a door that says do not enter what happens next, I could work with that. And I got an idea for a post series or at least a few post ideas.
What it taught me though, was that as I did with the Grit Girl, my Secret Agent, I started with characters who had ideas and frustrations. I wondered how they might meet one another, where they would meet and live. How could it get way out of hand? Before I knew it I was mapping my thoughts to Conrad’s Secret Agent and realized there were enough parallels to make it work. Their ideas and frustrations were things I’d kicked around in my head for a long time cuisinarted with contemporary ones.
Each character had some element of me within them, pieces of my mind, like Eru gave to the Ainur in creating the music of the Ainulindale which was the blueprint for Arda.
When I set out to write, then, I have an idea and consequently, my first draft, is probably not what I think most people consider a first draft. The question of what is a first draft is a regular one on Reddit. For some it is an outline, there are placeholders, inline comments to do something later, etc. I write and work the words as I go, stopping, reworking, considering and then rereading a paragraph or multiple and right ordering words, sentences and paragraphs until I like the flow of each piece related to the other.
I don’t write to a word count on a daily basis. I don’t worry if I write 100 or 5000 words a day or in a session. I write and ask if I made satisfactory progress. What is that? You know when you see it. It could be breaking through one hold up, it could be spewing out a full chapter.
With ideas and characters I find an initial structure or version of the story. As it emerges and I work out the actual beginning, middle and end of it, I begin to consider if I’m telling it the right way. What manner of presentation to the reader would have the greatest impact? Whose story is it really, who should be telling this story? And, most important to me, what really is the purpose of this piece? What am I trying to say and how well is that coming across?
For the Grit Girl I finished my fourth version, or structural revision. There were many edits and I guess each of those became drafts. The revisions meant changing the POV, main character, and order/method of the telling of the story. The story itself didn’t change. The message of the story was refined and clarified.
I’ve done the same thing with my non-fiction, Neithan the Wronged, which is a reader’s guide to the Children of Hurin presented as a biography of Turin using a meta-textual framework carried on from Tolkien’s own meta-textual approach to the Legendarium.
This project began as wanting to see the many published versions of the story, outline, and related information pulled together into a single story. I learned quickly it wasn’t possible for legal reasons. I went through different versions, landed on the biography concept, and rewrote that twice. Again, the content or story was there almost completely from the beginning, but the presentation and right ordering were revisited over and over.
Maybe with having this order in place I will now see refined drafts instead of versions causing upheaval.
While I have had parts and sections of both read for feedback, I have not had beta readers or any outside editing. Time will tell how I handle those elements in addition to copy editing and any outside developmental editing.
So I guess I still don’t know what a first draft is and I’ve adopted more of a software approach. The first thing I write becomes version 1.0 when it is done – minimally viable project (MVP). If I edit and clean up it is 1.1 etc, whereas if I structurally change chapters or main characters I move on to 2.0. This is important because I fear losing what I wrote and as a consequence I keep versions saved as is and make a copy that I label as the next version despite the software having revision control.
Hopefully this helped you get an understanding of how someone else handles something every writer faces which is getting from here to there to done, though I’ve done nothing regarding done.
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