On a self-imposed deadline to finish the first draft of my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress this month, and with less than four thousand words to go, I might actually make it. Fingers crossed. Then, a few months stepping back to let it stew. Phew.
Meanwhile, a rushed post here because – argh! – this week the plotted end turned out to be rubbish. Cue confidence collapse. Which might have been a form of procrastination. An unwillingness to reach The End after years of working part-time on this one story.
Anyway…
The trick that helped to stop panic from setting in as the denouement crumbled before my eyes was the notion of Draft Zero. Emma Darwin did a great review of the various forms of these beasties on her endlessly useful Substack this week. Here’s the generic link as I can’t track down the specific one, but please do have a look around for it. Emma’s advice is alway brilliant, imho.
https://emmadarwin.substack.com/
Over the past year, I’ve found Draft Zero most useful as a way to convince myself that this is just a first version, something to edit. There are no darlings that can’t be killed off, even denouements that are the result of years of planning!
I’m writing towards An End, not The End.
I’ve also recently refined my Draft Zero scene planning system, having belatedly realised that what shows up on the page is a sort of half-way house between the outcome I anticipated would work and how the creative act changed it AKA typing as storytelling AKA the antithesis to long-form outlining.
The first time around, a scene is what happens between intention and execution. A Draft Zero.
Being a structure fanatic, I have developed a matrix for plotting suchscenes without wasting too much time. So, in case it might help anyone else trying to plot less, here is a worked example.
First, I locate the scene within the Act, with the current one highlighted.
For my current Act 3, these scene headings are: Q-Factor (from James Scott Bell) – revised gaol/plan – plan goes wrong AKA High Tower Twist (Save the Cat for Novelists) – Dig Deep AKA psychological self-revelation (Truby) – New Moral Action – Final Battle – Resolution – Final Image.
For the actual scene plan, I borrow from Story Grid, the online resource, rather than the book. Scene driver A [not necessarily the protagonist] wants to achieve X WITHOUT causing or revealing Y. This came from an open email, so I don’t feel it’s stealing their idea to share it here.
Next, from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story: a) how does A plan to achieve their desire, b) what is their underlying desire, including how it’s changed from previous scenes, and c) what is their motivation. Truby is very good on the differences between plans, desires, and motivation. I find the distinctions help a lot.
Here’s how I laid out the plan for my current New Moral Action scene.
Story Grid Tom wants Beth to help him set William free WITHOUT alerting the prosecuting magistrate.
1) Plan: to persuade Beth they are both going to hell if they let William die in the castle.
2) Desire: to save himself from psychological death by escaping from Beth’s control.
3) Motive: he cannot accept his return to the conformist half-life of a wilfully blind servant.
From Mckee, I set a diametrically opposed force of antagonism. That is usually a character with the opposite desire to the scene driver’s, though it can be an external event or inner state. In this example, Beth wants to persuade Tom that William cannot be freed without risking a hundred lives.
Finally, the polarity switch of a story value = free/imprisoned, frightened/brave etc. For Tom in this scene the switch is oppressed/assertive.
Finally, the outline contains a read-on prompt, usually either a cliff-hanger or a significant outcome that drives the story in a new direction. I haven’t worked that out yet, so please fill in the blank!
Leaving all that to bubble away for a day or three usually improves the plan, but that doesn’t mean it will translate onto the page. Often, the action or character development turn out to be less plausible than anticipated. Sometimes, a Eureka! moment arrives to improve on the plan. Other times, the whole thing turns out to be rubbish and I have to start over again. But at least the plan is there as a basis to analyse what worked, what’s missing or ill-conceived, and where missing or new bits might fit, either in an earlier or later scene.
As the threads of the story come together towards An End, this system is proving useful. I’m hoping it will also help structure the development edit during which, no doubt, tens of thousands of lovingly crafted words will get thrown out and half the scenes spiked.
On the upside, that might mean I’ll never finish this story and won’t have to think up another one. Yay. Have a lovely creative time, folks.
IMAGINE A PICTURE HERE. BLOGGER AND/OR GOOGLE WON’T LET MY COMPUTER TALK TO ITSELF TODAY;
A daily diary of the WIP is on Rowena House Author on Facebook, a professional page which has a thousand plus followers and around twenty people who see the posts. No, me neither.
