A first draft of a story looks like this:
The final draft of a story looks like this:
They are both words on pages, nothing more. Why can’t we just write the final draft the first time?
We forget that we’re making ART. You don’t just start from the beginning and write it as though you were reading it – that’s called “taking dictation.”
Imagine trying to draw a picture by starting in the upper right corner and doing it line by line like a printer?
You don’t do that. Even very good artists (not me) start out by planing how the image will fit on the canvas.
Say with a few circles to represent a figure. I’ve seen my sister do this. (She’s a real artist.)
It is only thanks to the miracle of photoshop I can draw at all. That started out like this:
After I started putting lines down, I could see that I’d made the shoulders too high and the arm too fat. (also I re-centered the image because it was all crowded down in the lower right corner.)
Like a drawing, you can’t ‘see’ if a story is working until you actually put something on paper. You don’t draw like a printer; don’t try to write like a dictaphone.
PS: In case you are wondering, yes, it took me three weeks to write this short blog post. I had to delete most of my first draft! Wooooaaaaah this postscript is so meta.
