Day 24
1hr 45 mins re-order + 30 mins editing + 15 mins planning
+ 30 mins planned writing
Today we are thinking about editing again. This time, there is an awareness of the whole story.
Though it seems like she only wants us to focus our editing on one particular scene, Jacqui provides us with questions which will be useful at the end of a first draft. But I am nowhere near that, in terms of word count or story coherence.
I got the impression reading this that she had been envisaging us writing from the start of our story to the end. Is that how you approached the work? This makes sense of her question about whether you feel the narrative is coherent or if there are missing scenes. My narrative is a Swiss cheese of guess work and contradictions. I had thought that when she had given us prompts to write “a scene where . . .” it meant that we were hopping around the story.
Perhaps I was conditioned to approach the story this way because I didn’t know the underlying structure. I don’t like working linearly if I don’t have a plan, so I felt I could only develop disparate ideas, rather than commit to a direction.
I certainly don’t have a draft that I can edit line-by-line; I have a wordy and speculative collection of scenes. Therefore my response to this exercise was adapted to bring me slightly closer to the coherent narrative she is describing here. Today was the first time that I ordered scenes and placed them in one document. Rather than printing out the whole and going through it with a pencil, which would be premature, I got a sense of how I had distributed the story so far, and which parts are entirely without development.
There is some stuff there which might survive a proper story plan, but there’s already parts which clash with later ideas, and will probably be re-written or removed.
Exercise
- Print out + edit work to date
- Type up a revised scene (I guess this means re-type for most people)
- 500 words (I added 30 mins editing + 15 minutes planning): add to your revised scene
My response
- Re-ordering the scenes took most of my time, but I still focused on one scene to edit in detail. Then I did the usual 30 mins general edit / re-writing and 15 mins planning, before adding 500 words more to the edited scene.
- Another note on timing: if we are at the target word count of 23,000 then surely reading through — let alone editing — is going to take far more time than the usual 1 hr or so. I didn’t try editing mine line by line, but it still took a while to compile it all. A proper edit on 23k would take me hours and hours and hours. This feels like a weird thing to suggest at this stage. Am I missing something obvious?
- I was re-working an early scene. I did feel more confident to go back and write earlier dialogue between the main characters, having some sense of where they would get to, therefore how to pace it and what ironic layers to put in. I’m still not sure of their profiles, though, so writing them feels as exploratory now as it did at the start. I am confirmed in my view that I need to think through a character and their journey before I start trying to put them into a story.
- I wonder what would have happened had I written the draft in a linear way. I think that for the rest of the guide (6 days), I will do that. I’ll carry on from this early scene, not skip ahead, and see where it takes me compared to my previous approach.
all course content copyright Jacqui Lofthouse thewritingcoach.co.uk