After The First Draft: Part 1

A short series looking at how to approach revisions. Part 1: Avoiding the Accordion.

Once you have a complete first draft it isn’t always clear what to do next.

By a complete first draft I mean where you have a beginning, middle and end with no place markers you intend to fill in later. It may need a lot of work and even wholesale changes, but there are no gaps in the sequence of scenes.

At this point there will be some obvious technical changes you need to make. Clarify, cut, develop etc. but generally the story is there.

So you have this thing. Now what?

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Two Sides To Every Story. At Least.

Tension is a key element of drama. Tension is a question. It’s an outcome you want to know. It’s anticipation. Tension comes in different sizes and shapes.

“There’s a bomb on the bus!” is a different kind of tension to “Are you waiting for someone?”

The big, explosive stuff (physical or emotional) takes care of itself. You may need to manage it, but tension will be present. My daughter’s been kidnapped! — very hard to underplay.

This post is about working tension into smaller, more intimate scenes.

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Writing A Bottle Scene

There are times in a story when not much is going on. Your character is isolated or apart from everyone else, away from activity or the main plot.

Readers may find this sort of scene dull or pedestrian and the suggestion will be to zhoosh it up somehow. This advice will most times be right. However, sometimes you want a scene to be low key or concentrated down to a few ingredients.

There’s nothing wrong with this, often the strongest character moments come in the quieter moments. But that doesn’t mean you should have long scenes over a cup of coffee and endless banter, nor does it mean you need a bomb on a bus and SWAT teams flying in through windows to make it exciting.

One of the best ways to see how to make the most of a limited situation is to take a look at what TV shows call a ‘bottle episode’.

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The 5 Best Pieces Of Writing Advice

The following are the five best pieces of advice to do with writing that I have come across. Obviously there are many excellent tips out there and how useful they are depends on the kind of writer you wish to be, but these are the ones that made a big difference to me and seemed to make the most sense.

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Making Your Readers Care Like Your Characters Care

In any story the main character will have something on their mind. They will worry and fret based on how important ‘the thing’ is to them.

Just because they happen to think this thing is worth obsessing over or getting upset about doesn’t mean the reader will also.

Showing the character really worked up about this thing won’t automatically make the reader feel the same way.

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Reading With An Agenda

There are probably some books you feel like you should read but you don’t really want to. 

They’re great books—you know this because everyone says they are. They win awards and feature on Best Of lists and when you look at the photo of the author on the back, they seem to be saying: “This is what a real writer looks like.”

But your heart sinks if you even think about picking the book up. It’s not your style, it’s not your genre, it’s too long, it’s too boring.

Well, there’s a way around this problem.

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Not All Characters Deserve To Be In The Story

It’s pretty easy to overpopulate a story.

Usually, it’s to make things seem realistic (an office should have people in it, a party should be crowded).

Sometimes it seems like a clever ploy (with 73 suspects the reader will never guess who the murderer is!).

Or it can be a way to give different types of readers someone to root for. These characters are the love story, these guys provide the adventure, this one will appeal to older women, this one to comedy fans...

Too many characters often make a story hard to follow, confuse the reader and create unnecessary complications. But once they’re in, taking them out can seem daunting, like pulling at a single loose thread that ends up unravelling the whole cardigan.

It’s really not that hard, though.

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Give Characters Interesting Anecdotes

If you want readers to know about your character’s past, put it in the form of an anecdote.

Don’t just tell them her parents split up when she was nine, have her remember how they bought her a talking doll before telling her the cat had been run over, a princess outfit before telling her Nana had cancer, and a bike before telling her they were getting a divorce. And now, every time someone gives her a present, she feels like running screaming from the room.

Fact and figures, names and dates don’t mean anything to readers.

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The Real Reason Writers Need To Read

There’s a specific skill you gain from reading widely — not just the stuff you like — that is an essential tool to becoming a better writer.

Critiquers, beta readers, editors, they read your WIP and offer you advice and opinion and maybe even suggest solutions. But how do you know if they’re right? 

And what about when different people offer you conflicting advice? Who’s right then?

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Writing Great Characters

You know how important a great main character is to a story. Sherlock Holmes or Elizabeth Bennett or Becky Sharp. Whether they’re fighting at the edge of a cliff or having a quiet moment of reflection or making a total ass of themselves, you want to be there with them. That’s the sort of thing you want to create, right?

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