| |
| |
From David M. Kaplan's Revision: (Ch. 2--Revising Before
Writing) |
| |
"The most important revisions often occur before
we even write the first draft, when we are giving ourselves
the imaginative freedom to see and re-see our stories
six ways to Sunday and back again. Film directors often
say a film is made before the first frame is shot, in
the writing and the casting. Write a good script, cast
the right actors, and it's already ninety percent successful.
The same is true of fiction: "Write" and "cast"
your story as best you can before sitting down to write,
and you're halfway there. |
| |
| |
[Some suggestions]: |
| |
1. Don't be in too great a hurry to write that first
draft. Story ideas mature slowly, like wine. |
| |
2. Do as many imaginative permutations as possible of
your characters, point of view, setting and conflict,
until you feel you're really "onto something." |
| |
3. Make notes. |
| |
4. Sketch out possible sequences of events. Plotting,
really. Add to them, subtract, shuffle them around. |
| |
5. Write some brief passages in the possible "voice"
of the story, or of individual characters, to test them
out. |
| |
| |
Through playing with story possibilities, we begin
to figure out and flesh out what the true story might
be--before we even begin to write. From the very beginning,
we're trying to avoid being frozen into the First Idea.
[…] It's through playing with the concrete details
of the story that the abstract meaning changes, not
the other way around. As the poet William Carlos Williams
said, 'No ideas but in things.'" |
| |
-------------------------------- |
| |
| |
"To go even further, let us admit that revision
is not merely the final phase of the process. It has
been going on since the concept first began to take
shape. Very few of us write as much as a sentence on
paper without some juggling and readjustments of an
idea and the words that seem fit to express it."
|
| |
--R.V. Cassill |
| |
| |
"Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely
uncertain about the character and the predicament, and
a character in his predicament is what I have to begin
with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing
how to treat it, because that's finally everything.
I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an
unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway
from it that I want. I need something driving down the
center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it."
|
| |
--Philip Roth |
| |
| |
"My wife took a look at the first version of something
I was doing not long ago and said, 'Goddamn it, Thurber,
that's high-school stuff.' I have to tell her to wait
until the seventh draft, it'll work out all right. I
don't know why that should be so, that first or second
draft of everything I write reads as if it was turned
out by a charwoman." |
| |
--James Thurber |
| |
| |
"Everything hit me at once, you know. That makes
it very difficult to describe just exactly what is happening.
[…] I have been criticized for not enough detail
in describing my characters, and not enough furniture
in the house. And the odd thing is that I see it all
so clearly." |
| |
--Katherine Anne Porter |
| |
| |
"One thing that is always with the writer--no
matter how long he has written or how good he is--is
the continuing process of learning how to write. As
soon as the writer 'learns to write,' as soon as he
knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way
to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way
to say nothing, he is finished." |
| |
--Flannery O'Connor |
| |
| |
"Fact and fiction: fiction and fact. Which stops
where, and how much to put in of each? At what point
does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory
shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling
it as it is, or was, and make it into what it ought
to be--or what would make a better story? Choices, choices." |
| |
--Gail Godwin |
| |
|
