Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

two or more trips through your typewriter on its way to immortality. That's okay. What's not okay is writing your first draft with the assumption that that's all it is, a first draft, a piece of unfinished work, and thus an excuse for you to be utterly sloppy about what you're doing. It doesn't matter how rough it is, I just want to get this down; later on I can worry about turning it into English. Well, no. Sorry, but I don't buy it. All a sloppy first draft teaches you is to be sloppy in your writing.

What's useful in this regard is a sort of doublethink process. You know you're going to have to rewrite the piece, but in the course of your first draft you act as if the version you're doing will be final copy, ready for the printer. This way you'll produce a cleaner, more artfully crafted first draft?and, every once in a while, you'll find that it can stand as written, that you honestly don't have to rewrite it. And even when you do, it's a whole lot easier to remodel than something that reads as though you typed it with your toes.

In this vein, do your first draft on decent paper, not second sheets. Set your margins, use carbon paper, the whole bit. This trick of acting as if is the best way I know of learning to clean up your act.

2. REVISE AS YOU GO ALONG. This is handy in novels especially, but I also find it a useful practice in short stories. Often when I'm writing I'll get an idea somehwere along the way that sends the plot off on a previously unanticipated turn. This will frequently necessitate some changes in the material I've already written?a scene changed around, a bit of plot business planted earlier, whatever. The natural impulse is to go ahead with the book or story until it's finished, then backpedal and fix up the rough spot.

You'll make things considerably easier for yourself if you return to do this back-and-fill work as soon as possible, before going on to complete the manuscript. You may not want to break off the forward progress of your work immediately, but as soon as you reach a convenient stopping place, and when the revision work is clear in your mind, go back and do it.

There're a couple of reasons why this makes sense. First, you don't have the prospect of ultimately going back and revising constantly nagging at you. Once you've done the work, you can feel good about the portion that's written and devote your complete attention to what's coming up next. Second, the changes you make in the early part of the script may spark additional developments later on. This kind of revision is like fence mending; the sooner you see to it, the less elaborate a job it winds up being in the long run.

3. KEEP YOUR MIND ON YOUR WORK. This is always good advice. While it may not be quite as crucial for a writer as for a demolitions expert, it's still good policy. As far as rewriting is concerned, or avoiding rewriting, it's very important. A lot of the sloppy habits that make comprehensive revision necessary result from paying insufficient attention to what you're doing and to what you have done. If what you've just written isn't fresh in your mind, you're apt to repeat phrases you've recently used, or contradict something you've previously established. The blond in Chapter 3 is suddenly a brunette in Chapter 7. Chapter 5's orphan is talking to his mother in Chapter 9. If you're lucky, this gets attended to in your second draft. If you're not so fortunate you never do spot it. Then an editor spots it, and that's embarrassing. Or no one spots it until it's published, whereupon five hundred readers write in and you really feel like the southern end of a northbound horse.

The first remedy for this is concentration. Avoid writing when your mind is tired. Don't work behind any kind of mood-changers?alcohol, marijuana, ups, downs, tranquilizers.

If you're doing a piece of work that takes more than a day to finish, start each day's stint by rereading the previous day's production. More to the point, don't just read what you wrote yesterday. Proofread it, making those minor pen-and-ink corrections that are required. This gets details fixed in your mind, and it also gets you into the flow of the narrative. If you're working on a book and you've been away from it for more than a few days, don't just read the last chapter. Read the whole thing?and, if you've been away from it for a long time, read it more than once.

There's another advantage, incidentally, in proofreading as you go along.

It increases your confidence in what you have produced while saving you from the eventual chore of proofing the entire manuscript all at once.

Just as you look at what you've done yesterday before going to work today, you should get in the habit of looking at the preceding paragraph or two whenever something comes up that breaks your concentration. This will help keep you in the flow and avoid repeating words and phrases unwittingly. This factor alone will keep me away from dictaphones and tape recorders forever, incidentally. I want to be able to see what I've done, and if I can't immediately check out how it looks on the page I