TECH: Short Story Blueprint: Step 5: The First Draft (Moldie Oldie)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 20 Sept 2011

Ready? Got all those other steps all done?

Step One: A list of traits (with action tags!) that you like and dislike?

Step Two: Answer the questions! What kind of story, setting, time? What are the name, age, traits, problems or faults, and motivation for the main character, their opposition, and the major secondary characters? Where does your story begin and end? What research do you need to do? If it was onstage (or a movie or TV -- straight to DVD?) what would be the dramatic scenes? Who might publish this?

Step Three: Expand those main characters. What is their dominant trait (and tags)? What is their goal and motivation? When do they enter the story and leave it? What is their physical description and role in the story? Oh, and what is their self-concept?

Step Four: What is the story question and answer? What is the scene/sequel chain linking them? For each scene, what is the goal or scene question, problem, conflict, and disaster or scene answer? For each sequel, what are the emotions, thoughts and planning, and decision?

With all that background, it's about time to start putting words on paper -- what most people think of as writing! Sooner or later, you have to write a draft. And, now is the time.

Writer's Digest, May 1992, has the article by Jack Bickham about Step Five: The First Draft. And here's my summary of Jack's article.

Jack starts out with two pieces of advice -- first, waiting won't make you more confident. So start writing. Second, you can always fix things later.

Incidentally, when talking about plot, Jack talked about the story question and how the ending must answer that question. When talking about characters, Jack talked about their self-concept, and how hard characters will struggle to protect their self-concept. Now, what is the most frightening, motivating development to face any character? Something that threatens that self-concept? And what threatens it the most -- change! That realization of change is at the core of most stories. That's what we mean by the moment of change that starts a story.

So, if you're not sure where to start? Take a look at your descriptions of the characters personality, and think about opening situations that would threaten that. Something that threatens their self-concept.

Jack talks about one writer who always started her first draft with her main character getting off of a train or bus in a strange town in the middle of the night. She said she has never used that opening in a finished story, but throwing the character into that moment of profound change always got the first draft going.

"Find the change and start writing from that point."

Jack also has several suggestions for keeping yourself on track. First of all, keep reminding yourself of the story question and the story ending answer. That's the framing for your story, and everything needs to move from the story question towards the story ending. Second, remind yourself of your character descriptions as you work, and keep your characters consistent. Third, work with your scene sequel chain. Fourth, if you start fretting about the prose or find details, drop back to writing a detailed synopsis. Just add details to your block diagram, your scene sequel chain.

Fifth, Jack recommends that you proceed in a sequential order. As he points out, if you skip around, you're most likely to write the easy parts and the ones that you see most clearly. Eventually, you need to write it all. But starting with the easy stuff can leave you with an intimidating pile of hard parts to do. I'm not sure that I agree with this, but it is an interesting point.

Last, but far from least, Jack points out that short stories may have given you experience with intense short bursts of writing. But for novels, professional production, you can't afford to wait for that. Instead, you need to regularly produce. Write every day, and keep track of your writing. You're training yourself for marathons, not sprints. So start clocking those miles!

Write the draft. Don't stop to do a lot of revision now -- that's the next step. Right now, you just need to produce pages. False starts, messy transitions, limp dialogue, characters that even their mother wouldn't trust, and so forth are all part and parcel of getting the first draft down so that you can fix it later.

When you get stuck, take another look at your story question. Then ask yourself what is happening right now in the story, and how does it relate to the story question? If nothing is happening, kickstart the actions, thoughts, feelings and get moving again. If whatever's happening doesn't matter to the story question -- skip it and move on to something else.

All right? So step five is really sit down and generate that first draft. Take all that background material, and start turning up pages (or filling screens?).

Write! And we'll be back to revise it soon...