• Beer Fridge
  • Home
    • December, 1919
  • Me?

Literature and Libation

Menu

  • How To
  • Libation
  • Literature
  • Other
  • Writing
  • Join 14,874 other followers

Browsing Tags draft

Craft and Draft: Plotting Progression

May 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Do you remember the exact moment your pet turned from kitten into cat, or from puppy into dog, or from tiny goldfish to slightly less tiny goldfish? If you’re a normal human, probably not. Our brains tend not to notice small, incremental changes that happen over a long period because we’re only fed little pieces of information each day, and struggle to put all the puzzle pieces together to create a single image of the change. The only way we really notice the complete evolution is by comparing the present to the past using photographs or some other artifact, so we can make a direct comparison between mewling kitten and meowing cat.

Your progress in writing follows the same rules. You improve slowly over the course of many sentences and paragraphs written over many hours and many days, and you rarely notice any improvement as it is happening, even if it is relatively drastic. This is partly because of the natural functions of your brain, and partly based on how we’re told progress is supposed to work.

We are taught, through school and the visible success of public figures, that progress is a linear thing, a perpetually chugging and climbing train that always moves upward and forward, upward as we scramble up the Aggro Crag of our craft and forward as we hurdle over the obstacles of life and art, American Gladiator style. It makes logical sense that every word we write, every short story and essay we finish, moves us closer to our goal of becoming excellent writers. Every hour we put towards getting better actually makes us better. Practice, in theory, has a one-to-one progress pay off.

If we graphed the idealized form of progress, the purest, sweetest form of achievementitude, it would look something like this:

progresssimple

Pretty simple: as time stomps ever-forward, our skill inevitably improves.

But obviously nothing in life is idealized, not even our fantasies and dreams. Writing is a roiling, boiling witches brew of different techniques and skills, all of which need to come together to create a strong, compelling narrative potion. It requires a close eye on the cauldron and balance of the various ingredients – for these purposes grammar, imagery, dialogue, creativity, and structure – to brew up a tincture that readers will pick out from the other bottles on the shelf and actually want to imbibe.

And because these skills are not perfectly synonymous with each other, because they require different, often disconnected parts of your brain, because they may come naturally or not come at all, progress is never going to be perfectly linear. We’d like to think that each thing we write is still moving us forward though, so roadblocks in certain areas are just plateaus, times when we circle the wagons to weather the dust storm until we can sally-forth once again, all pen-and-paper manifest destiny like.

If we graphed a more realistic representation of progress, it would look something like this:

progressslightlymorecompelxA little more complicated, but still manageable: time still trudges down his path and we still get better, but we have to take some detours and hang out in some places until it’s safe (or smart) to move on.

But naivety; I know you too well. How quaint to think we’d always be improving, never slowing or staggering or falling behind! For a long time this idea, the notion that progress could never be stopped, clouded my mind like a heavy early morning fog that had yet to be burned off by the heat of the afternoon sun. I wanted – expected – everything I wrote to improve upon the last thing I wrote. I lived under the impression that every essay had to out-do the last, every short story needed to be more and more nuanced and literary, that every metaphor had to transcend mere humanity and do a fly-by buzz of the god’s palatial manor up on Olympus.

But that is as improbable as it is impossible. We are hard-wired to want to always improve, but if you obsess over what is in practice an unachievable goal, you’ll never actually write anything, stuck the underworld on the quest for unending improvement. You will write stuff that just isn’t very good. You’ll backslide, your words will fail you, you’ll have some pieces that instead of ringing out into the world with the flair and revelry of a triumphant trumpet, will slither out and drop onto the ground with an unsatisfying and sort of disgusting plop.

You’ll find that the train of climbing progress is actually a roller coaster, and at any moment the bottom might drop out, sending you screaming down the rails into a valley of meh. Sometimes you’ll write a thousand words and the only improvement is a single adjective clause tucked away in some otherwise uninspired paragraph. Sometimes you’ll have a fresh, invigorating idea that ends up ruined by your poor execution. Progress isn’t always upwards, but that’s OK. You can learn just as much from your not-so-good writing as you can from your really good writing. The point is, you’re still writing.

If we graphed the ups and downs, the cheers and jeers, the flourish and the plops of how we really grow, it would look something like this:

progressalotmorecompelx

Now it’s looking more like a true writing process: when your dialogue is near perfect, your imagery is like, something grey or something? When your creativity is soaring, your grammar might be guttural Cro-magnon pseudo-speak and your structure might be reminiscent of a 3rd grader’s finger painting. You’re still technically improving, but sometimes only in one area, sometimes moving downwards before upwards, but still forward, as each new lesson, good or bad, teaches you something new.

This all dances around the idea that we are humans (not robots who can eat and survive on graphs alone) and our moods and wants and emotions all play into how we create. All of these skills are completely dependent on how we employ them, how we glue them down on the construction paper and arrange the colorful shapes, which is in turn dependent on our confidence.

Confidence, even using bold and headstrong people as examples, is nigh unplottable. The data for such a thing isn’t made up of numbers that can be understood by anyone in any real way. It’s like a taco made of paperback books or a cupcake baked with broccoli inside and frosted with hummus.  It’s outside of our normal brain bubbles. It’s all very non-Euclidean.

But, since I’ve got this graph theme going, I tried anyway. If you added human confidence to this whole progress thing, it would look something like this:

progresstotallymorecompelx

Regardless of your actual progress, you’re constantly fighting the growth and maturity (or lack thereof) of your confidence. Each success boosts and sends the orange line twirling skyward, like a model rocket at full blast, bumped slightly off it’s trajectory. Each rejection and stream of mean comments causes the rocket (and orange line) to smash into the ground (or X-axis) at full force, trying to burrow into the ground to hide from the negativity. Confidence in your art is the one ingredient that can make or break the literary meal, as it effects every single aspect, down to how you cook it and present it to your diners.

Progress can be so intangible, so caught in the fishing nets of practice and skills and self-doubt, that we can’t even see it as it creeps into our brain. It is important to take some time to track your progress, either with spreadsheets or a notepad or an abacus or something, so that at intervals you can take a break and actually look at what you’ve accomplished and how much you’ve improved.

Progress is slow going and often painfully roundabout, and yet we’re taught to think it’s a straight arrow-shot to fame and fortune. We’re conditioned to think that achievement is positive and should be celebrated, while failure is negative and should be shunned. But that’s just silly. No one could possibly live up to the expectations of winning or succeeding at everything they do, every time they do it. And if they somehow could, via a pact with some ancient evil or a old, bored Djinn, I’d say they were actually missing out on the lessons that can be taken away from doing something wrong.

Don’t be upset if your progress slows or stop or goes backwards, or even if you can’t even see any progress for a while; that is completely natural. The only thing that will actually hurt your ultimate progression is to quit completely. If you stop writing, you stop learning – from the wins and the losses – and soon enough, your graph will be blank.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a ton of squiggly, messed up lines that show I’ve tried, than no lines at all.

Craft and Draft: Building Castles

August 6, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Not all of these posts are going to include Lego. Just most of them. Maybe I’ll do some in Minecraft to mix it up a little.

This post piggybacks off of my previous post about characterization, but is more focused on complete drafts.

Building Castles 

As one of my enthusiastic classmates was waxing poetic about her experience revising her latest fiction piece, it struck me that the entire Draft Development Cycle (DDC) builds on itself. You’ve got all of the details, characters, and settings in your head, but they are raw, disorganized.

There is some strong magic swirling around the craft of writing that hides the creative process. Unlike master painters whose every brush stroke can be witnessed and studied, excellent writers seem pull their stories and skill out of the ether, as if it is an extension of their very soul. Young writers often don’t see the missing piece; the years and years of practice and patience and persistence. 

This leads to disillusionment.

Like when you imagine an amazing picture of a bear riding a snowmobile firing laser blasters at robot dinosaurs, expecting it to look like this:

Why yes, I did Photoshop this myself. Thanks!

But when you finally draw it, it looks like this:

Yep, drew this myself.

See? Disillusionment.

As is the case with any creative art, it takes time to refine your skill and eventually master it.

As a writer, you have a singular advantage over painters and sculptures and sidewalk chalk drawers: your art is infinitely malleable. First draft sucks? No worries! Just rewrite the parts that suck until they unsuck. You can never make a mistake that can’t be rectified.

Drafting is like playing with Lego. You start with a blank, flat green board, have all the pieces you could ever need in a big plastic bin next to you, and can build anything you want. For this example, let’s say you want to build a picturesque castle. You imagine the castle in your head, and get to building.

1. Zero Draft

This is the very first draft of your piece that comes oozing out of the primordial goo that is your psyche, malformed, unsure that is should even exist. I call it the “zero” draft instead of the “first” draft, because chances are your main theme is underdeveloped or completely missing at this point. This is the draft where you let your brain shift the gears while you carelessly slam your foot down on the accelerator. As to be expected, you might crash and burn and suffer horrible injuries, or at least swerve wildly around the roadway, endangering everyone and everything around you.

The zero draft of your Lego castle would look something like this:

They told me I was daft to build a castle on the swamp, but I build it all the same.

It’s not not a castle, but it’s certainly not something you’d like to defend during a siege. But you’ve got a start, the bones, the basic structure of the castle, even if it’s little more than a pile of rocks with a flag at this point.

2. First Draft

After you’ve taken some time to evaluate the structural integrity of your castle, you can rewrite your zero draft and fix a lot of the problems. You can add content, remove stupid fluff, flesh out characterization, and really right the ship. Don’t go too crazy with fixing grammatical stuff at this point; you’re more concerned that the mortar of the castle will hold, than what color heraldry you’re going to put into the great feast hall.

The first draft of your Lego castle could look something like this:

This is what I imagine the front gates of Riverrun looks like. But you know, with more walls.

It’s a lot more castle-esque now. There is still a gaping hole in the back of the structure, and your guards would demand hazard pay to walk along those ramparts. But at least a drunken peasant could identify it as a castle now, which is a step in the right direction.

3. Draft X

The next draft is actually a series of drafts, in which you tweak your content, have other people read it, question character motives, and ask probing plot questions. This is when you build a tall tower for your gaoler, only to tear it down when you realize you don’t even have a dungeon. This is when you fill in the murder holes you added just behind portcullis because your kingdom isn’t, and will never be, at war. This is when you learn about your story, and can play with character desires, tweak dialogue, and repair any of those major plot holes that have been sucking the narrative into a mire of confusion and triteness.

The Draft X castle could look something like this:

What manner of man are you that can build a castle without rock or wood?

Or like this:

That is no Orc horn!

Now you have a castle to write home about. Unless the castle is your home. Then your letter won’t go anywhere. You can see that the walls are strong, and you’ve even made room for windows and arrow slits. The roof has taken shape, and you have staircases connecting the scenes for your characters to walk up and down.

It is important that even though your castle looks pretty good, you don’t stop. Stopping now would be like running a 100-yard dash and stopping at 95 yards. It’d be like baking a delicious cherry pie for 45 minutes when the recipe called for 60. It’d be like dressing yourself in the morning but intentionally not putting on pants. Don’t stop yet, you’re not done, but you’re almost done.

4. Final Draft

Getting here takes time and effort, so if you’ve made it: woot to you!

Now is when you get to really dissect the language of your story, correcting unintentional passive constructs, replacing boring verbs with explosive ones. This is also the time to adds bells and whistles; flesh out characters and setting descriptions, re-pace your action scenes, and de-mushify the romance.

Eyes to text as comb to hair.

This is what your final draft would look like, if it were a castle:

The horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep one, last, time!

Now you can pitch it or post it or sell it or just bask in the glow of your hard, tedious work.

Just remember: a castle (much like Rome) isn’t built in a day. Even the best architect needs to plan out how he uses his materials, which stone goes where, and how many beams are needed to support the weight of the roof. If your piece isn’t what you expected it to be, draft and draft again. The bin with the all the Legos is right next to you.

Dig in. Build. Draft. Create.

  • Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Connect with us:
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Follow Following
    • Literature and Libation
    • Join 14,874 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Literature and Libation
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...