Itchy Bitesized 32: Taming Your Draft

Get to grips with all your material and versions, so you can tackle the next stage

Whether you’ve got eight files all called ‘Final’, ten boxes of notes, or twenty carrier-bags of photocopies, it’s horribly easy for your work on a novel or creative non-fiction to sprawl into chaos. This Itch Bitesized is about how to get back in control.

Photo by Sam Burke on Unsplash

1) FIND OUT WHAT YOU’VE GOT

1. Corral every file, version, notebook and scrap of paper and label everything clearly so you know what each thing is, and if you can, what order different versions come in.

2. Assemble the text in order, printing it out and read through it, trying to find the problems, but not yet solve them. If you have more than one version of a scene, roughly compare them and note the differences, but, again, don’t try to sort it all out at this stage.

3. Write a developmental synospis of what, at the moment the story seems to be.

When this work prompts ideas about things to change - which it will - don’t be sucked into seeing them through. Note down the thought and keep going. In other words, don’t fiddle!

2) GAIN CONTROL

Any of these may help, not necessarily in this order:

• Get to grips with version control; figure out a naming convention for folders, files and versions so that you always know what’s what and can (fairly) easily find what you’re looking for. Rename things retrospectively if you need to.

• Write a chapter plan, max three sentences: 1) The situation at the start. 2) What happens. 3) The situation at the end.

• Read a book on story structure - my favourites are John Yorke’s Into the Woods and Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise - and play with fitting your story into such a structure.

• Use paper and pen to imagine more clearly and concretely anything which is still vague, muddled or generalised:

  • sketch-maps or building plans

  • spreadsheets of relative ages of characters

  • timelines of the whole novel, or individual strands of a non-linear narrative

  • try a planning grid.

  • event mind-map, tracking chains of cause-and-effect.

  • theme mind-maps: myths, quotations, aphorisms, single words

  • relationship mind-maps: rivalries, sexual loves, familial loves, jealousies, fears, hopes and dreams which connect or divide your characters

  • a dramatis personae of characters including unnamed ones, e.g. ‘shopkeeper who sells the gun’

  • character-in-action questions

  • ask your novel Seventeen Questions 

  • rough-draft ‘side-car’ stories - events which are not in your story - to explore different characters, their points-of-view and backstories, motivations or interactions. Also very useful for events which do happen during the story, but off-stage, so they’re only reported.

• List things you need to find out and research you still need to do, and make a plan to do them.

• Use index cards or post-it notes to set out the chapters, main events or scenes and experiment with the order they’re told in. Include major off-stage events which are not directly narrated. Scrivener is very good for this kind of work.

• Take your projected word count and divide it by the number of scenes. If your 80,000 word novel has five acts, each of which has an internal act-structure of five chapters, that’s only 3,200 words per chapter. Not so bad, eh?

3) RE-DRAFT

There are two basic ways to rework a project: revising what you have, or starting again as if it’s a new project.

Although revising a text you already have sounds more efficient and less trouble than creating a new thing from scratch, in my experience the opposite is often the case. A novel conceived from scratch out of a deep bed of well-composted material from previous has a flow and coherence that’s very difficult to find when you’re chopping and hacking and carpentering existing text into the available spaces.

• EITHER Revise what you’ve got:

  • Consolidate a single new file of the whole text

  • Make a To Do list of all the necessary processes

  • Make a plan of campaign for eating this elephant. It’s likely to include several passes tackling different issues.

  • Even if you’re normally an out-of-order writer, for each particular pass it’s safer to work forwards, to keep a grip on what the reader encounters when or start a new project.

  • Remember that existing text inevitably has an authority and vividness which will tend to dominate text which doesn’t yet exist - and try to resist it.

• OR Work it as a ‘new’ project:

  • Treat every scrap of material up to this point as research and process writing

  • Set to with your normal planning processes as if this is a wholly new project.

  • Re-audition previous characters: make them re-apply for their new jobs by proving their fitness for the new project

  • If you must in the end re-use actual text, don’t use copy-and-paste: copy-type it so it goes through your creative brain: ‘thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry,’ as Virginia Woolf said.

Either way, good luck!