Hello, writers. Last night I finished what a former editor of mine calls a “loose draft”. It took exactly two months and ended up just under 65k words. I kept a daily record of my progress, and I learned a lot from it:
- At the 30k word mark, I despair of everything.
- From then on, the loose draft gets a whole lot looser.
- If I stop writing for even one day, it takes several days to get back on track.
- Thus, it’s better not to take any days off. Seven days a week.
- It only takes an hour or, at most, two, to get the day’s writing done.
- If I can just knuckle down and make myself do it.
- Bribes help. (By the end, I was balancing a chocolate nonpareil on the edge of the keyboard, with the understanding that it wasn’t mine till I opened the manuscript file.)
All right, to be honest, I already knew some of those things. But it’s comforting to have a written record of them. It will remind me, next time, that I’ve been through all this before and survived. I recommend trying it.
In a loose draft, I end up writing a lot of what I call telegraph lines. They’re lines that come at the beginning of a scene and telegraph the end of it. Whatever action the scene is going to encompass, the telegraph line implies houw it all turned out.
Examples of telegraph lines are:
- They almost didn’t make it.
- In the end, it was the diplodocus that saved the day.
- The ship would have sunk if the storm had lasted even an hour longer.
- Afterward, they weren’t sure how they survived.
- They found the Jewel of Togwogmagog in the last place anyone would have expected.
The trouble with telegraph lines, of course, is that they kill all the suspense in the scene. Each of the above lines tells you something that would have been better left till the end, eg:
- That they did make it.
- That the day was saved.
- That the ship didn’t sink.
- That they did survive.
- That they found the Jewel of Togwogmagog.
In the next revision of the draft I finished last night, I’ll remove all telegraph lines. They do serve a purpose in a first draft. When you sit down and stare, in despair, at the blank screen, a quickly typed telegraph line can help you organize a scene in your mind. And then if you come back to the scene later, having left it for a few hours or days, the telegraph line will remind you where the scene was headed and how you intended it to end.
Once the telegraph line has done that, though, it serves no further purpose. It’s there for the writer, not the reader. I recently read a posthumously-published book that contained telegraph lines. I’d never seen any such lines in the books published while the author was still alive, and I feel sure she would have taken these ones out had she been around to do so.
Tonight’s challenge:
Choose any of the telegraph lines in the box above. Copy and paste it. Then write the next five sentences. Then remove the telegraph line.
By the way, I’ll repeat this again in a comment below, but just in case I forget— would anybody be able and willing to host Write On! on Thursday, May 18? That’s the week after next.
Write On! will be a regular weekly diary (Thurs 5pm leftkost, 8 pm east) until it isn't.
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