Sentence = Story
Discovery and Voice
Since I’ve started my news video series, Edit With Me, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the AWP sessions I attended back in March, ‘The Sentence is the Story.’
It was a packed session; they had to ask people to leave so they didn’t break the fire code. Perched up on the top floor of the Seattle Convention Center, we had a lovely view of the city as the panelists discussed their love of editing.
The speakers covered all sorts of things. The way word placement in a sentence changes its weight in the story. How ‘cadence commas’ are a thing and you shouldn’t be ashamed of you love of them, a la Oscar Wilde. To do a revision round with a ‘poet’s hat’ on, listening to how your story sounds aloud, the flow of it, the music.
Amazing stuff.
Most pertinent for me, just starting on the second draft of my new WIP, was the advice that: ‘the first draft is discovery, the second is voice.’
I have mentioned I am a pantser, through and through. But I heard a term a few weeks ago that I find I prefer: premise plotter. Instead of starting with a character, I generally start with a premise.
What if I wrote a sci-fi without hyper-drive and antigravity? How would they make that work?
What if I wrote a fantasy, but I started at the end of the Hero’s Journey, and the Hero has been lied to?
For this newest fantasy, I started with a premise and an image. What if there are ‘demons,’ or creatures of another realm, and a group of people tasked with controlling them? And a hooded figure with a raven or some such on their shoulder. Imagery of ‘death,’ darkness, carrion eaters, etc.
Charming, right? But it brought up questions.
Why do these people control the creatures? How do they get loose or escape?
What do the people around them think about this? Are they called in like exterminators or are they feared?
Who is this hooded figure? How did they get like that? What importance do they have in this society? Are they human? Magical? Dangerous?
I had to discover all these things. I had no idea at the start, other than some quick character sketches and an antagonist. I like to start with the antagonist. Bad guys want something. They will do anything to get it and to do so they need to break the mores of society.
More questions. What are those morals? Why are they in place? Who enforces them? Why do we care? Are we rooting for them or the good guy? What kind of protagonist would be needed to stop them? Why is that person good when the other is bad?
This discovery is my first draft. I am telling myself the story as much as I am telling it to anyone else. I have an end goal… sometimes. A vague direction and crisis in the future. But first I have to get my characters there.
It’s my favorite part.
The second draft is voice. As I’ve been working through this WIP (I have not title, yet) I’ve been refining the characters’ voices. Who is brusque, who is quiet. Who charges in unheeding, who is methodical. How do they interact and how does that change what they say?
So many questions! Sometimes I feel being a writer is more about answering questions than coming up with descriptions. And, as I stated last week, I have to find a way to show this individuality in a way the propels the plot forward, answers the readers’ questions, and delivers the emotions I want.
Easy-peasy?
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Thanks for reading! Anna