As writers we all know what it's like to have an idea run dry just a few paragraphs in. It's infuriating and demoralising and often the idea is so strongly present in your mind, you just can't shift it and get going in a more productive direction.
I've tried numerous approaches and they all seem to have something to offer – there just is no right method. I'll try and outline what I do, what sometimes goes wrong with it, and what I try to do about the problems.
The first approach is often blitzing to get a very rough first draft. I just write continuously pulling in whatever characters appear, in whatever place, paying more attention to the conflicts than anything else. I just want to get the story down, really to see what it is about. Often I don't know where it's leading when I start writing, and sometimes it'll run dry on me. But sometimes it doesn't, and then I end up with a few thousand words, poorly structured, full of errors and incomplete. But at least it's now something I can work on. The work is the rewriting, not the writing. My first drafts are always very rough.
So what do I do with a draft? I try not to look at it for at least a few days because I'll still have my head full of what I expected the story to be about. Sometimes, it's a quite different story in reality. Sometimes, the protagonist turns out to be someone else, or the really powerful conflict is one that isn't developed in the first draft. Looking at it too soon will encourage me to produce an equally poor second draft.
So after maybe a week, I take a long critical look. And I mean critical. I look at it as if it came from someone else and I needed to identify everything that's wrong with it. I use words like boring, slow, thin, unconvincing. I pick out the trajectory of the plot, the characters, the conflicts, the scenes, and look at the structure. Does the plot move along? Are the characters credible? If not, what's missing? Is the conflict strong enough to generate interest? Can you identify with the protagonist? None of this is yet about the language. It's about structure.
I sometimes make notes about the plot, characters, scenes, conflicts, locations, objects and symbols, really just to get a clearer idea of what I'm working with. I have to decide whether there's enough to work with, or does it need to be completely rewritten. I used to worry a lot about throwing away text but it can be a mistake polishing up poorly structured stories. I have to be willing to face facts: often my writing is not worth keeping and I'll start again and produce another first draft and work on that.
Next comes the reordering and restructuring. Sometimes, I've introduced a character in the wrong place, an event occurs too late or too soon, or a piece of vital information is kept from the reader. What I'm looking for is getting the plot moving. So I look at each scene, each event, each piece of dialogue and ask what it contributes. If it doesn't contribute anything, I cut it or rewrite it. Now I'm well on the way to a second draft.
The second draft, when it comes will often take a lot longer than the first one, but is written far more carefully. After all, I now know the characters fairly well, I know the significance of what they do and say, I know the locations and scenes I want, so I'm much more in control. I file the first draft out of the way as soon as the second draft is finished, so that I don't get pulled backwards. I've done that before and ended up with a succession of poor second drafts.
The second draft will be much better quality and I now that the structure is right, I like to study the language much more carefully. I pull out clichés, dull phrases, poorly constructed sentences, and correct them in situ. I look at the use of verbs to drive the action, and adjectives to create the right sensations. I think carefully about all those so-called rules about adverbs and prepositions and decide whether I want to follow them. Sometimes I do. Once I've produced a second draft, I tend to print it and read it through several times to gauge how it makes me feel. Of course, I'm too close to it but if I get to an important passage and it doesn't move me, what chance does it have with a new reader? I scribble all over the print-out.
This may go on for multiple drafts sometimes as many as seven or eight times or even more. Each time, I am trying to refine the language and squeeze the maximum impact from each sentence. I often hit a point where I know it's not quite right, not quite finished, but I don't know what to do. But there's a trade off between continually tinkering with the text progressively undoing the previous improvements, and settling for poorer quality than I can achieve.
Sometimes I get to the point where, after having refined the language as well as I can, it still doesn't work as I want. Sometimes the story just isn't strong enough, sometimes I've just made a mess of it. Sometimes I just don't understand my characters as well as I thought I did. And you do need to understand them very well indeed.
On balance, I think probably about half of what I write turns out passable, but I'm only pleased with less than 10% of it. Sometimes I end up dropping an almost finished story because the likelihood of turning out something good is better with a new idea. That leads to a lot of unfinished files, but it's not lost work. I can always go back to them.
I like this way of working because the emphasis is on getting the story visible early on. But there are other approaches, like having a more planned approach. I'll talk about how I do the planning in another article.
