For years I had been labouring under the illusion that I should write short stories, because they were less work than writing novels. I can tell you now that it doesn’t matter how long your story is, a short attention span is a bad thing regardless. Something changed for me last summer, when motivation aligned with idea and I spent the last months of 2018 hammering away at my keyboard, trying to churn out at least one thousand words a day for my magnum opus, the book that they would plant at my grave instead of a headstone. By the end of November I had finished my first draft, just over 120,000 words that were all arranged in an order that told a story. Then I did what any writer worth his or her salt will tell you to do – I walked away from it for a while.
I went back a little later and went through it. It turned out that it was mostly 120,000 very bad words, but buried in those very bad words was A Decent Story. That was satisfying for me, especially as A Decent Story hadn’t been in there from the start. At the beginning it was just a faint idea in a skeleton world, but the process of writing firmed up the idea and put flesh on the bones of the world. And Lo, James Saw That It Was Decent.
So a few more months later, I’ve started the second draft. I wasn’t quite sure what a second draft would look like, but I can tell you now that my second draft is actually an entire rewrite. I might be able to salvage a few likeable paragraphs from the first draft, but I’m starting from scratch and doing the whole thing again, and I’m finding it energising rather than demoralising. You see, the first draft was me figuring out the story. Huge parts of the world changed as I wrote; major characters invited themselves into the story halfway through; I didn’t really know my heroes when I was writing those early chapters of the first draft. This second draft allows me to go back and start from the beginning, knowing what I now know about the end. I can introduce those major characters from the start of the story, have my heroes make a consistent journey, and foreshadow the richness of the setting from page one. In short, I can tell a better story now that I know where it’s supposed to end up.
Lots of writers would argue that it’s better to let your characters arrive at the ending without your help, and suggest I might be breaking that cardinal rule by already having a concrete destination. I see their point, and completely agree that a writer should always try to let the characters make the decisions and say the words, but I’m not ashamed of the fact that I have a vision for the world I’ve made. After all, I’m created in the image of the storyteller God and He’s always known how it’s supposed to end. The first draft was a journey for myself and for my characters, and the second draft will be the same, but this time I know them, and I know the world that they live in, and the story is always better when it’s told by one who knows.
