Friends, Fragments and First Drafts

When it comes to writing, I never throw anything away.  Like mining for gold, writing is a process of excavation and sifting through sediment to get to "the good stuff."  You dig deep for the truth your characters want to embody.  You dig deep for themes that reveal something about the human condition.  The sediment that is disturbed comes in the form of many drafts.  Awful, incoherent, sometimes nonsensical drafts.  It's essential that you learn to keep these drafts so you can sift through them later and ascertain their true value at a time when you're not so emotionally attached to them and can reread them with a different perspective.

I have folder stuffed with early drafts.  Unfinished, fragmented, and raw.  Why do I keep them?  I feel that for a writer its okay to be a hoarder.  There's no way to know what nugget of dialogue will make it to a finished scene.  Sometimes months or years after writing something you stumble upon it and it sparkles a fresh stream of thinking or reignites the original fire behind it.  When you have forgotten even writing it, that's the best.

Another important thing to remember: Never show anything to anyone while its still in development.  It's unfair to all parties involved.  A kind word from a friend can easily distract you.  A tiny bit of criticism from a relative is enough to stall your efforts or worse, sabotage you completely.  Case in point, back in May of 2010 I was about 70 pages in to what I thought was a good story about a newly divorced woman in her senior years.  It came from the complaint I've heard repeatedly from actresses that there aren't any really good parts for women and certainly not women over forty.

I want to create a character and situation people want to see but Hollywood (in its mad rush to make a gazillion dollars) just isn't listening.  I made the mistake of showing my infant script to someone close to me for feedback.  In hindsight, I ask myself, how could I have been so stupid?  Feedback on what?  I wasn't even close to finished yet.  None of my characters were fleshed out enough to evoke any sense of compassion in the reader.  Plot points were still loosely conceived, scenes were out of place or incomplete.  It was still in that messy "first draft on paper" stage.  The reaction wasn't good and worse still, I let it sit on the back burner for months, feeling dejected.  What a set up!  But that's what we writers do to ourselves.  Learn to keep your creative process to yourself until the right time.  Rewriting and editing will come later.  It's a distinct process.  A wonderful book on the editing process is The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lemer.

There is a time for criticism, feedback and polish and there's a time for free-association, wild abandon and creative exploration.  Mixing the two approaches can have hazardous consequences.  The need to create something perfect may keep you from creating anything at all.  Perfectionism is another way of keeping yourself blocked.  It sounds so reasonable, so admirable: "I'm a perfectionist."  But, the truth is if you wait to write something perfect, it'll never happen.  You'll never write anything.  Perfect doesn't exist.  No one writes a pretty first draft.

Give yourself permission to excavate the depths of your psyche.  What may come up initially isn't pretty but like that crusty sedimentary earth that covers gold, our first drafts are valuable layers of raw elements that with time and care may bear or reveal unexpected fruit.



This week's suggested website: (www.finaldraft.com) Final Draft is a screenwriting program available for both Windows and Mac.  It's easy to use and recognized as the industry standard.

This week's writing prompt:


Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Imagine a specific locale.  It can be a cabin in the wilderness, a corner office in a skyscraper or any other location from a script or novel you're working on.  Close your eyes and try to capture every detail.  Be sure to include your sense of smell, taste and touch to describe the environment as well.   Write for five minutes.