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in which the brother was, indeed, the murderer. You know enough not to use the technique of
foreshadowing to spoil suspense for your reader, and you should be equally aware of the disastrous effect
of a give-away title.
Arty titles. Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free, The Meaning of the Archbishop's Death, The
Implications of Troy's Kidnapping, Death Scares Me Not, and other similar antiquities will never appeal
to the modern reader.
Many writers are proud of the number of drafts they do on a novel. You'll hear them say things like, "I
did four complete manuscripts before I had it polished exactly as I wanted it." Indeed, the writer who
won't settle for anything but the right word, who wants his prose to ring true and to read easily, is to be
admired. But the writer who rewrites the same story again and again until he has it down pat is usually
not so much a careful artist as he is a sloppy one. If he had trained himself to write as clean and sound a
first draft as he could, he would not have needed to go over all that material again and again.
When I sit down to begin a new novel, I type directly onto heavy bond paper, with carbon paper and
second sheet attached. If a paragraph is not going well, I rip that set of papers out of the typewriter and
begin the page again, but I never go on until that page is finalized and cleanly typed in finished copy.
I waste a lot of paper.
But I save a lot of time.
The danger of planning to do several drafts lies in the subconscious or unconscious attitude that, If I don't
get it right this time, it's okay; I can work it out in a later draft. This encourages carelessness in your
original word choices, phrasing, and plotting. The more things you write with this approach in mind, the
sloppier you become until, finally, your first draft is so poorly done that no number of re-workings will
make it click.
No financially successful, critically acclaimed writer I know has let himself get caught in the "fix it in a
later draft" trap. Without fail, however, the hopeless amateur clings to this fallacious theory like a
drowning man to the only rock in the lake.
Disregarding this tendency for the multiple-draft writer to get careless with his work, there are other
reasons why you should learn to write good first drafts and eliminate revision wherever feasible. First of
all, your emotional involvement with the work can be the intangible quality that makes it exciting and
marketable. If you must rework the story several times, you will lose that sense of excitement and, more
often than not, create a finished piece that reflects your own ultimate boredom. Unless you have a firm
grip on the structure of your story, you may begin to change things, in a rewrite, that do not need to be
changed at all; reworking a story, you may begin to doubt all of it and alter it without logical reason.
And, of course, a great deal of revision takes time from your new work.
One familiar piece of advice given new writers is: "Put it aside for a couple of days or weeks and re-read
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it when you've cooled off." At all costs, ignore this advice. It is true that, in the clinical mood that
sometimes follows the completion of a work, you can see prose faults and correct them. More often,
however, you are only giving yourself time to start doubting the story. Often, when you approach it
again, you're too critical, because you've lost the mood that generated it. When you've finished a piece,
send it out straightaway and get to work on something new. You're a professional. You have all the
confidence in the world.
Reams have been written about the transition, and most all of that has only tended to confuse new writers
to no good end. The transition is easily written; any mistakes you may be making with it can be easily
corrected.
The transition is the change from one scene to another in a dramatic narrative, moving your characters
from one place to another or from one time to another. By stepping in on the end of this scene and the
beginning of the next, we can see a poorly done transition:
"Are you going to just sit there like a stone?" Lou asked her, looming over her where she sat in the big easy
chair.
She didn't answer him. She looked straight ahead, her eyes on the wall behind him, her lip trembling but her
determination otherwise unbetrayed.
"I don't have to take this, and I'm not going to," he said, turning away from her. "I can always find someone
else someone who will talk to me."
Still, she sat, silent.
"Damn you," he snapped, crossing the small room, slamming the big oaken door behind him.
He went down the steps and out into the clear spring morning, walked two blocks down Elm Avenue to the
bus stop, where he caught the 9:45 for town. He rode there without incident, brooding over the scene with
Rita, got off at Market Street and went to his favorite bar on the square.
Max, the bartender, wasn't as moody as Rita had been. He was willing to talk. In fact, he had some
interesting news. "Selma's been in here the last couple of days, Lou. She's been asking around about you."
The longest paragraph in the example is essentially all transition, getting Lou from one place to another. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]