Hello friends,
Every writer approaches the craft differently. What does a good “first draft” look like and how different is that from the final draft? Is there ever a final draft? George Lucas kept tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy for years and years and he kept putting out new editions of the films. Poet Gallway Kinnell has tinkered with and republished his brilliant poetry collection The Book of Nightmares several times. Tom Robbins famously writes and rewrites every page within an inch of its life before he moves on. He had the final say in everything he published.
Faulkner said to “kill your darlings.” That didn’t mean he killed his favorite characters, although his books and short stories have a high body count. It meant that people should sit down and write and write whatever comes to mind and then afterward, the writer should be willing to cut out things that seem unnecessary in order to make the final the best product.
Before they start writing, some writers go on location to do research. Some go to the library. Some go to a favorite search engine. Some ask questions of people they know. I did this for That Other Dashwood Girl. Zora Neale Hurston studied and wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote until she perfected the dialect and the character’s voices exactly as she wanted AND by the time it was done, it sounded like music.
She was a genius. If you’ve not read her work, you should remedy that immediately. Seriously.
It isn’t just her fiction that is inspiring, it is what she has to say about why people write.
In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, she wrote:
Perhaps it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself ‘Why?’ afterward than before. Anyway, the force of somewhere in space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
There are a lot of feelings we can have reading those words, and believe me, I feel a lot of things when I read them, but what strikes me is that maybe, there is one thing I share with her excellence, and that is, I write the first draft in my head and it seems, that she did as well. I hear voices in my head and I talk to them. I don’t mean to be glib here. I am not making a joke about people who suffer from schizophrenia. That is not funny and I wouldn’t do that. The truth remains though, that I talk to my characters and they whisper in my ear and I sometimes have to tell them to be patient.
Before I even sit down to write anything, I spend weeks and months talking through the plot, personality traits, the situation, the setting, the…well…everything with my characters before I get started. For me, the first, second, and third drafts happen while I’m out for a walk or while I’m making dinner so, by the time I sit down, I write what is commanded of me, by the people who I have created and who deserve to come to life.
Sure, after that, I do more drafts in real time. I'll add something here or there. I am constantly surprised by the twists and turns of the stories, but that is more like a journey than a process for me as well. When I am done, and feel that I am ready to go back and read it from the beginning, I hardly do any revisions. I edit. I will clean up some messes. I check my facts, because even in a fictional world, facts matter, but the story is, once told, the story.
While writing my MFA thesis, I realized that what I thought was the one-third mark, that it was really the halfway mark and I needed more. So after having 75 pages done, I went back to page one and added in 3 different points of view. I kept the original 75 pages pretty much intact, I just filled in the gaps. By the time I got back to where I was, I had 150 pages and the book wrote itself. I learned a lot from that exercise and I am pleased I did it. I learned that I needed to listen to the voices and let them worry about the drafts. I just need to report what they have to say.
Notes From My Bookshelf
I’ve really been on a great run of non-fiction books lately. Amanda Montell’s The Age of Magical Overthinking is so good. I could not help but think about how to use it in class. I read Questlove’s Music is History. It is so good that my university is using it as the common read this fall. Then, because I am a certain kind of nerd from a certain age, I read Nick de Semlyen’s The Last Action Heroes. It focuses on action movies of the 1980s through the lens of the 8 biggest names of the time. I can’t possibly use it in class, but it is a lot of fun.
Notes From My Keyboard
Just last week I started, Jane, the fourth book of The Austen Chronicles in earnest AND I had a banner week. As of this writing, I am past 11,000 words and have five chapters done. It is flowing. Jane Fairfax has been quiet long enough.
Since my last newsletter, I found out that Welcome to Mansfield was named a finalist for the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Award for best work of YA fiction for 2023! I will find out on August 3rd if it earns a Bronze, Silver, or Gold Medal. Either way, I am honored and thrilled.
If you have not picked up your digital advance reader copy of That Other Dashwood Girl or Comics Lit Vol 1. You can get them both here. If you click the links of the books just above, you can pre-order them at your favorite bookstore. If you want to watch and/or listen to me and Ada McCartney, narrator of The Austen Chronicles talk about the audiobook process, you can do so here.
Finally, the printed collection of The Strong Stuff Vol II is out now from The Fictional Cafe. I wrote a story called “Surgeon General’s Warning” in 2019 about the dangers of the smartphone culture in which we found ourselves. It was published in 2020 on the website. Just this week, the actual Surgeon General of the United States announced the need to label social media a health risk. It is so terrifying and cool that I predicted the future. You can read the article here.
Thanks again for being a subscriber,
ARF
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