There is a post over on Living the Romantic Comedy (Billy Mernit's blog) called "You and Your Shitty Draft" where the odd quirk many writers have of wanting to make that first draft perfect is discussed. I made a couple of comments and decided it was worthwhile to post them here. They are:
Comment #1:
It's interesting how many people can do the same thing yet all approach it in a different way. For me, the first draft IS the outline. I can only write by starting with nothing and seeing where it goes. I can only know characters by discovering them as I write - scenes, dialogue etc.
Usually, it begins with a lot of rambling exposition as I try to see where I'm going and who walks into the scene or what my character(s) might do or think. Then something happens and I just start following to see where it all goes.
As Ray Bradbury says somewhere about how he writes: "I throw up on paper then clean it up." (Or something to that effect.)
Writers inevitably want everything nice and tidy and gussied up before anyone sees what they've done but, for me, a first draft is by definition crap. To use an old analogy, you would hardly expect to see David when they dug out the chunk of stone DaVinci eventually sculpted.
My outline is only revealed when I can go over the first draft and see what the story is.
Comment #2:
May I be Columbo a moment? One more thing ... Samuel R. Delany (who tends to be a bit egghead-ish in his essays) has what I think is a great observation about writing in an essay called 'Thickening the Plot.' He says of writing:
"I distrust the word 'plot' ... (it) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading ... Talking about plot, or theme, or setting to a beginning writer is like giving the last three years' movie reviews from the Sunday New York Times to a novice filmmaker. A camera manual ... would be more help. In short, a vocabulary that has grown from a discussion of effects is only of limited use in a discussion of causes."
He goes on to talk about the story revealing and developing before our eyes as we write, how each word, each choice, reveals more of the story, just as each word removed alters it.
When talking about something like an outline, it seems to me that is an attempt to determine effects before seeing what the causes are, which are revealed in the writing process - as it happens, so to speak. So the whole business of worrying about shitty first drafts is kind of ... I dunno. Maybe a worry less about writing than about how we might appear. ("What a shitty writer! Did you SEE that draft?")
(btw ... Delany's essays are in a collection titled - About writing: seven essays, four letters, and five interviews. As mentioned, very eggheadish. I found it a bit turgid overall, but with interesting bits.)
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