Methods of Drafting

When I first started writing with a view to getting published, my methods were quite haphazard. I’d come up with an idea or find a prompt in a literary magazine competition and allow the kernel of a story to roll around in my head like a snowball, gathering weight and girth, until I was ready to start writing.

At some point along that writing path I would go back to the beginning, essentially to refresh myself of the premise, and find myself spending hours – sometimes even days – fine tuning a single scene. I would become so caught up in the detail that the story itself lost momentum. Additionally, I invested so much in the scene that it became a cast in stone element of the story, regardless.

By nature, I lose interest easily. I’m not quite Homer Simpson - The problem with first person POV is…Oh look, a split infinitive! – but, when the story doesn’t move from my head to the screen at a fair clip, my mind starts leaping ahead to the next idea. That dictated a more structured approach to drafting would be required, if I was going to successfully complete a story.

So I started writing a brief scene-by-scene draft:

1. Danny prepares a birthday surprise to bring to his girlfriend’s apartment and wake her with breakfast in bed and an expensive gift.

2. Danny arrives to find her ex-boyfriend’s car in the drive. Internal struggle = silent retreat or confrontation?

3. etc.

This approach gave me a direction from the outset and immediately improved my ratio of completed to commenced stories but new problems arose; while I was not dropping back into earlier scenes and fine tuning them to death mid flow, I was still writing each scene in full detail before moving to the next. The effect was, by the time I’d reached the end of the draft I had no energy or enthusiasm to go back and improve the areas that needed work. I can see this in some of those earlier stories if I read them back now – they are still not bad, in my humble opinion, but they could be so much better if I’d aggressively edited them after finishing the first draft.

Now I have employed yet another system which, based upon the speed and ease “Mirror Man” is approaching the end of the first draft, is my most suitable yet. I started out by writing a synopsis of the story. I then took a notebook and jotted down brief physical and mental characteristics of the main players, details of anticipated locations and any other pertinent information that needed to be carried throughout the story.

From there I drafted the outline of the story, usually writing a sentence or two for each intended chapter - sometimes a little more if I had some vivid ideas for the scene.

Once that outline was completed, I looked at it globally, to see where foreshadowing and back story might be useful and then set off writing the first draft. While I wrote that first draft, new ideas came to mind, secondary plot threads, enhanced character details etc. but rather than get bogged down, I made notes and moved on.

I expect to finish this first draft in the coming weeks and at that point I’m going to put “Mirror Man” away for at least two weeks before taking out those notes, returning to Chapter One, and enriching the prose.

For example, Chapter 1 begins:

A glass-walled restaurant, slowly revolving 800 feet above the bright city lights of Las Vegas seemed a far from ideal dining experience for a man afraid of heights, confined spaces and crowds.

"Agora-acro-claustrophobia?" Valentine asked, eyebrows raised.

It sounded too ridiculous to be true and, squeezed into a large red Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants, the little man looked as if he should be joking; he was the embodiment of the Pillsbury doughboy on vacation. The expression on his face, however, was as sober as a ‘Mothers Against Drunk Drivers' meeting.

Pillsbury took a handkerchief from his pants-pocket and dabbed at the sweat that ran like a mountain spring from the dome of his bald head. "I'm not sure that's a real word, but yeah, it sums up the condition pretty well."

"So what possessed you to have dinner at the ‘Top of the World' restaurant?" Valentine continued, hoping conversation might distract the man from his impending coronary.

"My psychiatrist said I needed to face my fears," Pillsbury said, unleashing another barrage of finger-prods upon the elevator's call button.

"Sound advice, no doubt, but are you sure he meant you to face them all at once?"

***

My notes, among other things, address the following:

1. Need to establish that the restaurant is also very busy, to satisfy Pillsbury’s fear of crowds.
2. Could ‘Mothers Against Drunk Drivers’ be abbv. to MADD? Is that acronym widely known?
3. Exact location in restaurant is not clear. Need to establish their location as being the lift lobby, much sooner.

Etc.

I can’t say if I’ve reached the final evolutionary development in my writing technique yet, but I’m as comfortable and as excited about writing as I’ve ever been and I haven’t yet lost interest in…Oh look, a dangling preposition.