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Writing a rough draft5/3/2023 ![]() Once you’ve written the scene and inserted it, you should read all three scenes in sequence a few times to make sure it all flows and makes sense. It will also help you to make sure your scene is able to be inserted neatly. This process will ground you in this particular part of the story. So what happens immediately before, and what happens immediately after. Listening to this song helped to get me in the mood and made writing a new scene seem less daunting.īefore you start writing, I would recommend that you read over the scenes that will be on either side of your new addition. The most recent one I used was “Too Bad” by Rival Sons. When writing a new scene for a completed draft, I try to find a song that suits the tone of both the specific scene and the novel overall. Music has always been very helpful for me in these situations. But once you’ve taken some time away after completing the draft, it will take some effort to get back into that state of mind. When you’re in the midst of churning out that first draft, you get into a real groove. One of the hardest parts of expanding a rough draft is that you’re no longer in the right headspace. It’s never fun when you realize you did a bunch of extra writing for nothing (as I have many times myself). So definitely allow yourself some time to brainstorm your additions before you actually try to work them into your story. Sometimes you may end up figuring out that a short exchange or a bit of added exposition can accomplish the same thing with far fewer words. Brevity is the soul of wit, so it’s important to always question whether or not a certain scene is essential to your story. Here are some tips that will hopefully help you along the way to making your novel as rich and detailed as it can be.īefore you start writing, give some heavy consideration to whether or not you really need this new scene. You’ve probably gotten attached to the flow of your story at this point, and even making a change you know will be for the better is rough. It’s no easy task to just drop yourself into a random part of your story and start writing something new. So you decide to go back and write more scenes to flesh things out better.Įxpanding your rough draft can be very, very difficult. ![]() You may also feel like your worldbuilding could use more detail or that you want to make some additions based on new research you’ve done. This comes after you end up realizing that your characters aren’t quite developed enough, or that a plot point feels unearned since it kind of comes out of nowhere. We’ll get to cutting in a future post, but for now, let’s talk about expansion. Like cooking a good meal, editing your rough draft will help to highlight its best flavors while downplaying others. ![]() Two of the biggest types of revision I’ve had to do on my novels have been cutting and expansion. In a lot of ways you’re still figuring out your story as you write, so it’s not that surprising that your rough draft will be far from perfect. Though they had trouble finding common ground on much else, brilliant writers Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner agreed that first drafts are often-if not always-terrible. And after all that work, you’re done!Įxcept we writers know that finishing your rough draft is not at all synonymous with finishing the actual book. They imagine the hours, days, weeks, months, and even years of toiling over a keyboard. When a lot of folks think about the process of writing a novel, what they’re really thinking about is completing the rough draft.
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