Here's What You Thought

After a lengthy hiatus, 100 Books That Influenced Me has returned! I reread Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, and it fit too perfectly into this series to be reviewed anywhere else.

When the urge to reread struck, I actually had a bit of trouble finding this book, because I had misremembered the title as Dare to Be Done. This was, after all, what the book allowed me to do: I was in despair over ever finishing The Sleeping Soldier, which had sprawled into ten massive, messy drafts. Bell’s methods helped me sort this enormous mass of material, organize the pieces, and at long, long last put them together in an order that actually functioned as a story.

These methods are the two strategies that Bell describes in part two of the book, the section about transforming your rough exploratory draft (discussed in part one) into a solidly plotted novel (which you will then polish, polishing techniques described in part three). The first is to make an outline of everything that you’ve already written.

It turns out that it’s much easier to deal with ten drafts worth of material when you’ve reduced all those thousands and thousands of words to outline form. You can see at a glance what scenes you already have, and which scenes must logically come before which other scenes, and which scenes you need to have but haven’t written yet. Then suddenly you’ve got a working outline, which has given you a ton of new interest and enthusiasm, because the project seems so much more possible that you’ve accidentally written a bunch of those new scenes into the outline and simply need to type them up!

The other strategy Bell describes is not to copy and paste from one draft to another, but to retype everything. I scoffed as I read this strategy, but since I was desperate, I decided to give it a try, and goldarnit if it didn’t work.

First of all, although you can copy-paste a scene that doesn’t quite work across ten drafts, if you retype it, you find that you have to fix it.

Second, since the outlining ended up moving a lot of scenes around, almost all the scenes needed some revision anyway, so they weren’t accidentally referencing scenes that now happened later on. Retyping the scenes in order following the outline made this work happen naturally, since I knew what I’d already retyped.

Third, this made it very obvious if there were scenes I still needed to write that I’d missed in the outlining stage.

Absolute convert. Never copy-pasting anything again. The method worked so well that I used it on Sage, similarly a wilderness of many messy sprawling drafts, and transformed it into Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.

I’ve used the second-draft tools in this book most extensively, but since those tools work so well… I mean, I have been having a bit of trouble with the first draft of The Paper Bird. Maybe I should poke through Bell’s first-draft suggestions and give a few of them a try.