#8 Discovery through Drafting, Leaving the Judging Till Later, The Inherent Power of Small Stories, “The Young Who Died Delivered Us”
"Tiger" on Panamanian postage stamp/Franz Marc
Wikimedia Commons
DISCOVERING THROUGH DRAFTING
“When beginning writers complete their first draft they usually read it through to correct typographical errors and consider the job of writing done,” the writing teacher Donald M. Murray wrote in an essay called “The Maker's Eye.”
When professional writers finish their first draft they feel that they have just begun.
“Most productive writers,” Murray wrote, “share the feeling that the first draft (and most of those that follow) is an opportunity to discover what they have to say and how they can best say it.”
“Those that follow!”
The notion of multiple drafts may make some writers blanch. Shouldn’t you be able to just write the story, clean up your mistakes and be done with it?
Sure, if you want to cheat yourself of the chance to produce something extraordinary.
Writing is a process of discovery. Drafting is the time to explore.
Drafting is when you can freewrite, letting the words fly without judging their quality until later, during revision.
It’s the time to lower your standards — heck, as I urge writers, to abandon them. Anything to keep that little “you suck” voice from interfering with your ability to produce sentences, paragraphs and passages you can improve.
Saul Pett, a veteran feature writer for the Associated Press, once said:
“Before it’s finished, good writing involves a sense of discipline, but good writing begins in a sense of freedom, of elbow room, of space, of a challenge to grope and find the heart of the matter.”
Don Murray, who was my mentor for a quarter of a century before his death in 2006, often talked about drafting as an evolutionary process, with each draft illuminating the meaning the writer was trying to convey.
An artist as well as a writer, he saw the draft as a painter might, starting with pencil sketches, only then moving to the permanence of watercolor or oil on canvas.
When Murray was a freelance magazine writer, it was not uncommon for him to go through 30 drafts, revising each one before moving on to the next iteration. This is no exaggeration: over the years, he shared with me dozens of drafts of the war novel he was working until he died.
Effective writers use the draft to teach themselves what they already know, and don’t know about a subject.
Like Murray, they see every draft as one that be recast with new ideas, information and approaches. Cutting. Adding. Moving around the story’s elements until they fit, like a Rubik’s Cube.
Each draft brings you closer to the point when you must focus your attention on revision, the final step of the writing process.
Revision is the time when you strive to make everything you’ve drafted just right, plugging holes in your reporting, fact-checking, re-evaluating word choices and identifying spelling and punctuation mistakes.
Here’s the best way I've found to move through multiple drafts as quickly as possible.
FOUR STEPS TO MOVE THROUGH MULTIPLE DRAFTS — FAST!
1. Freewrite until you have a screen or page of copy. If you’re working on a computer, hit the print button. (A printer is essential to producing more than one draft.)
2. With a pen or pencil, mark up your story, noting not just the typos and misspellings as a newbie might, but identifying sections that can be moved around, amplified or eliminated the way a professional would. Read your story aloud, or better yet, have someone read it to you.
3. Make the changes, moving as quickly as possible, moving past the ones that elude you at the moment. A new draft may rectify them. Within minutes you have a new draft, one that contains the promise of the final one.
4. Continue with the process until you’re satisfied (the best writers never are) or deadline arrives.
Because you have spent so much time discovering your story, your readers should have little trouble discovering what it's about.
They will thank you for it.
CRAFT LESSON: DRAFTS SUCK? NO WORRIES!
“Compose First, Worry later.”
That was composer Ned Rorem’s advice to himself in a diary.
The quote lies at the heart of this week's Craft Lesson, which urges writers to avoid worrying if they think their first drafts are “rubbish,” as the venerable Irish short story author Frank O’Connor characterized his drafts:
"I don’t give a hoot what the writing’s like; I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.”
Worry is an occupational hazard for writers. They fear they’ve lost their touch and that their last good story will vanish without a trace, taking their career with it. Or they write an opening or a scene that seems to work and then they get stuck, unable to continue. They’re not just blocked; they’re frozen in place.
Frank O'Connor
Wikipedia
These fears didn’t bedevil O’Connor because he understood the value of revision. He practiced it “endlessly, endlessly, endlessly,” even revising stories that had already been published.
Read his hilarious story “My Oedipus Complex” for a taste of his brilliance.
“Drafting is the time to explore” as I said in this week’s newsletter introduction. But I disagree with Rorem.
Revision isn’t the time to worry. It’s the arduous but often joyous process of making meaning clear and finding the promise of the first draft in the final one.
INTERVIEW: THE INHERENT WORTH OF SMALL STORIES
I once had the great pleasure of attending a workshop with poet Patricia Smith, whose award-winning collections include “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah” and “Blood Dazzler,” a National Book Award finalist about Hurricane Katrina.
A muted thread of gray light, hovering ocean,
becomes throat, pulls in wriggle anemone, kelp
widens with the want of it. I become a mouth, thrashing hair, an overdone eye, How dare
the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just
another
small disturbance, try to feed me from the bottom of its hand.
She terrified a roomful of stalwart journalists by assigning us to take a news story we had published and transform it into a poem.
Except for a few childish efforts, I had never written a poem, but with her guidance and inspiration, I produced one about a story I’ve written about before: witnessing the drowning of a teenage boy as a young reporter. The poem was published in a tiny, obscure literary journal — a thrill nonetheless.
In retrospect, the experience reinforces one of the principal lessons of Smith’s “Three Questions with Patricia Smith” interview: the inherent worth of small stories. It’s a remarkable, inspirational exchange with a writer who produces unforgettable poetry and a teacher who conveys lessons every writer, no matter their genre, can appreciate and benefit from.
"Red Deer" on Panamanian postage stamp/Franz Marc
Wikimedia Commons
WRITERS SPEAK: STRIVING FOR IMPERFECTION
“I strive for imperfection, for that rawness, clumsiness, and awkwardness — which retains an energy — Perfection is the death of energy.”
– Walter Abish
There’s an appealing, counterintuitive quality about the Austrian-American author Walter Abish’s attitude toward perfection that’s somewhat appealing. The author of experimental novels such as “How German Is It,” which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, is less interested in perfection in his writing than the energy it takes to produce it.
Perhaps Abish realizes that perfection is also the enemy of good.
"Tip Jar"
Wikimedia Commons
TIP OF THE WEEK
“If you want to write, you must first write poorly.”
Insight that runs counter to common sense is a running theme this week.
At first blush, this makes no sense. If you want to write well, isn’t that what you should strive for? The only problem with that is that the beginning writer, with certain notable exceptions, lacks the requisite skills and experience to produce quality prose.
As the French literary master Gustave Flaubert told legendary French artist Vincent van Gogh, “Talent is a long patience and originality an effort of will and observation.”
Patience, grasshopper.
“Monkeys” on Panamanian postage stamp/Franz Marc
Wikimedia Commons
BOOKBAG: DAVID BOWIE'S READING LIST, PORCH THIEVES AND THE STORY OF A PILGIRIMAGE
Got a favorite David Bowie song? How about a favorite Bowie book?
Turns out the the late gender-bending rocker was also a voracious reader and kept an eclectic list of the 100 books that changed his life. There’s a new book, “Bowie’s Bookshelf” that traces their influence on him and a podcast devoted to his bibliophilia. Here’s the list, if you want to add them to your Bowie discography.
Ever had a package stolen off your porch? Ever wondered what happened next? Writer Lauren Smiley did and produced an amazing tale of a porch thief in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood and “a vortex of smart-cam clips, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance that would tug at the complexities of race and class relations in a liberal, gentrifying city.” “The Porch Pirate of Potrero Hill Can’t Believe It Came to This,” published in The Atlantic, is a disturbing portrait of the disturbing times we live in and a relentless, multi-layered story that’s impossible to stop reading or thinking about.
“The Young Who Died Delivered Us” is a story I wrote about a long-ago pilgrimage that my wife Kathy and I took on our honeymoon to France. A friend back home asked us if we could find the grave of his half-brother who had been killed in the Normandy invasion in June, 1944. It took us three days and two train rides, but we were finally able to lay flowers at the grave of Pfc. John Juba, Jr. in the U.S. military cemetery in Brittany, France. In his memory, I reposted in on Monday, Veteran’s Day. R.I.P. John.
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"Panama"/Matteo
"Golden Years"/David Bowie
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