Drafting: Make your story personal first, organize it later
Welcome to our first guest post! Philip Hauser, TL;DR Press writer, founder of Nocturnal Muse Sessions, and proud Austinite, shares his drafting process with us for our inaugural edition.
When I think about how I write and how I got to where I am, I find myself back in that dark bedroom of mine, on a dreary night in spring of 2006, when I attempted to write my first novel. The first line went like this:
Admiral Phandrena once again felt the cold chill of the cameras on every corner of the room that stared with scrutiny at the crew members on the United Colonist battle cruiser Ancel.
I was seventeen-years-old. At the time, I was thinking about two things: news reports about government spying, and knowing that my mom was doing routine searches of my room while I was off at school or working my part-time job at the local grocery store.
My second attempt at writing would happen a few years later in college when I wrote something else in another fit of late night conjuring. The first line of that story was this:
When I close my eyes I can still see the dozens of empty or incinerated cities my unit passed through as white powder rained down from black skies, dancing around the propellers of our helicopters as we landed, looking for survivors.
I was twenty-one at the time and had finished reading a history of nuclear deterrence during the cold war, along with watching a documentary of 9/11 shortly thereafter. The thoughts of nuclear holocaust and tall, burning buildings in New York City had haunted my dreams for over a month prior to typing out those words.
There would be more attempts after that. Attempts that would amount to hundreds of thousands of words and potential novels that may never see the light of day (and some of which you can find on my website). However, they were a necessary foundation to eventually writing better stories.
Start with the people
When I thought of my writing process and how I’d start a story, it was always some variation of those two first anecdotes: A situation in the news, or a historical event that intersected with my personal life. This always manifested itself into the beginnings of my narrative. Once I started, I’d simply keep going until some arbitrary word count had been reached and some form of emotional or cathartic closure had been attained. Overall, this is my preferred method when I go about writing a story or a novel.
Writing fiction, despite having several proven methods on how one can write fiction well, is for me an emotional and exploratory journey . In most cases, when I am in the middle of writing fiction, I find that being consciously aware of the mechanics and methods of fiction writing — especially while I write it — is the biggest roadblock to my ability to actually getting any work done. I believe it’s this way because stories are about people, and the best stories and main characters are driven more by their emotions and instinct rather than conscious thought. Human beings have emotions, or at least motivations, that drive our choices in life and that’s what I want to capture in my writing. My novels are usually character-driven and often deal with past trauma or being faced with an existential threat.
Whether it’s the space opera admiral dealing with the cold gaze of an anonymous police state, or the nameless soldier dealing with the PTSD of a nuclear war, their struggles are not just the vehicle for the narrative; IT IS the narrative.
Conflicting advice
Let me make one thing clear: First drafts are shit.
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to the game or Stephen King, it’s going to be bad. The only thing that gets me to see it to the end is the fact that my main character has a conflict and they need it solved.
What happens when this main character who has a problem, eventually encounters another character that has their own set of problems? What if this second character has a problem that is in no way related to the main character and they need the main character’s help? What if they don’t need the main character’s help, but simply want something that they already have?
Now it becomes a story where not only is it just a main character who has their own “plot” to solve, but now they’ve become responsible for this other person and their baggage. Do they help each other? Do they become rivals or enemies? Is one stronger and decides to help the weaker? Does one of them feel burdened? Does the other feel like a burden? Do they eventually learn to love or hate each other?
When I answer these questions, I have something because these conflicts now have to be addressed. That is what continues the story. That is what makes my plot: Who are these people, what are there problems, and how are they going to address said problems.
Write outside the draft
Sometimes my inertia doesn’t take me to the finish line and I hit a wall. Hate writer’s block? Me too.
My solution is often to write a short story about one of the characters that takes place before the events of the current story I’m on, within the same universe as I’m tinkering in. This does three things:
1. it provides character development for characters in the form of a past that I can refer back to;
2. it helps me develop a more distinct voice to my character that makes them sound more like a real, individual person and less like a “character” in a “story” I’m writing; and
3. most importantly, it breaks writer’s block and (eventually) gets me back on track to writing the story I originally started.
This often takes me to the end of my first draft. If you haven’t noticed, I don’t start with an outline. That comes later.
Beyond the first draft
I look at the story that I’ve written and I often have a panic attack at what I wrote because it often looks like a mess. That’s okay! Because like I said: first drafts are always bad, so you just have to deal with them.
I print out my draft and look it over. Typically, I’ll circle or X out entire pages and paragraphs. Keep this, trash that, move this section here, move that section there, insert new idea in between here. It’s like rearranging, discarding, and recreating giant blocks in order to create a well-stacked tower of coherence.
Afterwards, I move on to the more meticulous stuff of editing like spelling and grammar.
Now the second draft begins. This takes longer for me because now I have to stitch together what I wrote into something that looks more orderly. Sometimes this involves writing all new sections that have to tie in one block of narrative and connect to the other. Luckily, I’ve become familiar enough with my characters by this point that their actions can create naturally the beats that move the story along. By this point I have a way more coherence and better-written story in front of me.
Sometimes a third draft is necessary, but not often.
Wrapping it all up
That takes us to the ending. Endings are something I try to make as simple as possible. I think of my main character and what emotion and location they want to be in when their journey is over. Whether it’s feeling content on a beach, happy inside a mansion, or sad in a graveyard, it has to answer these two questions:
What is my character’s emotional goal and location goal?
My character doesn’t even have to be aware that this is what they want to feel or where they want to be, but I as the author definitely have to know this. After that, it’s easy to make that ending happen.
Your mileage might vary trying to take this method for a spin, and there are definitely more straightforward methods to go about writing your story or novel, but this has definitely worked for me. The more methods you try, the closer you’ll be to finding the one that works for you.
If you loved this guest post, give Philip some love over at @phil_nr_hauser! You can check out his short story, Catherine and the Wasteland, in the first TL;DR Press anthology, TL;DR: A Redditwriters Mixtape Vol. 1.
Interested in writing a future guest post? Send a query to tldr-press@googlegroups.com with the subject “Guest Post Inquiry”.