12/31/2023 0 Comments Story rough draft formatNo matter which approach you choose, I recommend investing time in character development and plot structure before you sit down to write the pages. I have been an acolyte of many a guru of story in my own career, and I continue to hybridize my approach as I grow as a writer. There are so many ways to break down your story, so many different ways to approach the brainstorming process. You have to discover the process that works best for you, and if you’re just starting out, expect to spend time in the trial-and-error phase. If you’re working with your main character and you can’t figure out why they need this adventure, that’s also a sign (and probably intimately connected to your plot problem, by the way). If you’re working through a plot outline and you can’t seem to get the story to work past the midpoint, that’s a signal to take a step back and figure out why the engine of the story is cutting out on you. The better your prewriting process is, the easier it is to produce a first draft that works in its major elements.Īn effective prewriting strategy is one that helps you troubleshoot the problem areas of the script before you ever hit the page. If there’s anything I preach to writers I coach at all levels and in every context, it’s to invest in your prewriting process. If you’ve read some of my other Stage 32 blogs, the fact that this is my first strategy shouldn’t surprise you. So that’s the goal: to produce a first draft that’s as solid as you can make it on the fundamentals so that your reader can help you find ways to take your script from ordinary to extraordinary. But if your first draft is solid on the level of “grammar” - we can jump to more advanced considerations. If your script is riddled with “grammatical errors” on the level of basic story structure and presentation, those challenges have to be addressed before we can even get to conversations about effectively pacing the flow of scenes, sequences, and acts or the quality of your scene description and dialogue. The idea is that if you can’t write a correct sentence, you won’t be able to structure an argument (logic), nor will you be able to deliver it with any kind of persuasive grace (rhetoric). And they build on each other in exactly that order. In my line of work as a lit professor, we talk a lot about the three arts of composition: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And to do that, you need to move the needle on the kind of feedback you’re getting. Why is it so important to submit a solid first draft to your readers? Because the ultimate goal is to shorten the distance between first draft and final draft (which simply means the draft that’s ready to be seen by decision-makers). It’s the draft you submit for that first round of feedback - either to your writers’ group, to the script coverage service here on Stage 32, to a writing coach, or to your representation, if they’re the lovely kind that give you notes on your work. And that’s what I mean here by “first draft.” It’s the first version of your project that gets seen by eyes other than your own. What does exist, though, is the first honest attempt to finish the work and submit it for feedback. So if we’re trying to define a “first draft” as some sort of pristine and raw untouched thing that has never seen the red pen (so to speak), I submit that it doesn’t actually exist. If you’ve ever typed a line of scene description or dialogue and immediately hit the backspace key to change it, you’re editing as you go. I don’t know many writers who never read over what they put on the page the day before and tweak it. In reality, the drafting process is (usually) a combination of writing new material and revising what we’ve already done. Some drafts are in better shape than others when they hit my desk, and so I thought that I’d offer some strategies here to help you improve your first draft process.īut first, a definition. My job in both cases is to guide the writers to a better understanding of their craft and to help them get clarity on the steps that will elevate their projects. In fact, you might even say that first drafts are my specialty. As a literature professor and a writing coach, I see a lot of first drafts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |