I am so very happy that I kept most of the first drafts of my novels and short stories. The temptation to shred them I managed to ignore, and these early efforts disappeared in big black shelf files and lay there for many years.Reading these first drafts again, I am struck by what they reveal of the writing process. First, they reveal the early stages of plot, characterisation and style. By "early stages" I mean that everything was a sketch and the sketching was an on-going process. Phrases, sentences and paragraphs stand there now, struck through with a pencil line, with suggestions for the rewrite scrawled into margins. Years later, it is easy to see what I was driving at, but the struck-out words, lines and paragraphs bring to mind now those statues by Michelangelo showing the giants emerging from huge blocks of stone.
Firstly, the openings and endings of some books are very different from the original openings and endings. What is more, themes become clearer, and even the names of the characters have changed in order, probably, to match the character that later develops. Furthermore, chapters have been reshaped, rewritten or even dropped as the book itself takes on a life of its own and takes responsibility for guiding plot and character development.
All this suggests that, no matter how I plan a book and the story it tells, books take their own life and shape while I am writing them and the end product is invariably quite different from the original plan. Plots can change, sometimes radically, not to mention the names of characters, how these characters develop and what happens to them.
If you are interested in reading more about this topic, I suggest you look at a most interesting article by Hephzibah Anderson on the BBC culture page. The link is given below.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200818-surprising-secrets-of-writers-first-book-drafts
Comments