Embracing the rough draft
Last night I went to a workshop on making independent films. Not that I'm trying to make one...but someone asked me to go, so I did, just in case it proved relevant sometime.
The woman giving the talk mentioned how, especially in her case of making a documentary, she'd end up with tons of rough footage for each day of filming. And then she'd have to wade through it all, and find the good parts, and somehow stitch it all together in the end to make a cohesive story. I've experienced a little of the same thing just recently, having to interview people for some freelance articles and then distill it all into a coherent narrative, with the parts that serve the story emphasized and a lot of stuff squished down to hardly anything, or even jettisoned completely.
With all that in mind, I don't feel quite a bad as I could about the way my "novel" is coming out so far. Every other novel I've tried to write, including my NaNo novel from 2002, has come out in a logical, generally linear fashion. This one is a hodgepodge of words. The scenes are out of order and there's just a lot of blah, blah, blah that may fit anywhere or nowhere. There aren't enough scenes where anything happens. If I don't like where one part is going, I'll cut it off and skip to something else. So what I have now doesn't read like a novel, unlike the one I wrote in 2002, which still was coherent at this point in the process. But it's okay. I'll think of it like I'm a movie director. I'll gather my rough footage at the end, and play with it and rearrange it, and leave stuff on the cutting room floor, and try to find the main narrative within the rest. Better yet, I can fill in the gaps with new material whenever I want, much more easily than a film director can.
The prose also isn't as tight as I normally write. It's more like a placeholder for better words. But I actually think that will make revision easier, not harder, since it will be so obvious where to start...and once I get going, I tend to get on a roll. It's the getting going that kills me. And speaking of going, I met quota again!
12993 / 50000 words. 26% done!
The woman giving the talk mentioned how, especially in her case of making a documentary, she'd end up with tons of rough footage for each day of filming. And then she'd have to wade through it all, and find the good parts, and somehow stitch it all together in the end to make a cohesive story. I've experienced a little of the same thing just recently, having to interview people for some freelance articles and then distill it all into a coherent narrative, with the parts that serve the story emphasized and a lot of stuff squished down to hardly anything, or even jettisoned completely.
With all that in mind, I don't feel quite a bad as I could about the way my "novel" is coming out so far. Every other novel I've tried to write, including my NaNo novel from 2002, has come out in a logical, generally linear fashion. This one is a hodgepodge of words. The scenes are out of order and there's just a lot of blah, blah, blah that may fit anywhere or nowhere. There aren't enough scenes where anything happens. If I don't like where one part is going, I'll cut it off and skip to something else. So what I have now doesn't read like a novel, unlike the one I wrote in 2002, which still was coherent at this point in the process. But it's okay. I'll think of it like I'm a movie director. I'll gather my rough footage at the end, and play with it and rearrange it, and leave stuff on the cutting room floor, and try to find the main narrative within the rest. Better yet, I can fill in the gaps with new material whenever I want, much more easily than a film director can.
The prose also isn't as tight as I normally write. It's more like a placeholder for better words. But I actually think that will make revision easier, not harder, since it will be so obvious where to start...and once I get going, I tend to get on a roll. It's the getting going that kills me. And speaking of going, I met quota again!
posted by Alison at
9:53 PM
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