Learning to write, again
With the help of Refuse to Be Done
Last week, I wrote about diving into writing before I understand what I want to be writing about. I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to try such a thing if I hadn’t read Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell, which presents a strategy for writing a novel in three drafts. I haven’t read a lot of craft books—this might have been the first?—and I was skeptical going in. I worried it would be too prescriptive and make me feel stifled (would he suggest the dreaded outline??), or that I wouldn’t find any advice I could put into practice at this stage, when I’m only thinking about maybe writing a novel someday and would also happily embark on an exciting new nonfiction idea. But I loved it almost immediately and have already found it tremendously useful, both for the writing tips and for making my existing process more legible to myself.
Bell, blessedly, puts outlining in its proper place: In the second draft. The first draft, instead, is the “generative draft,” where you find out what you’re writing about, who the characters are, and what’s going to happen by…writing it. Not thinking about it endlessly, not going down every possible research rabbit hole before composing a single sentence, not talking yourself out of your idea because you don’t already know its three-act structure. Instead, you start writing the interesting parts and see what happens. You write the boring parts a few times until they get interesting (and save all those deleted words; you never know). You write and write and write. It all counts. It all matters. It’s ok if you don’t know what it means—you’re not supposed to yet.
Then, in the second draft, you outline what you wrote, and then you rewrite it, from as close to scratch as you can stand. I do this kind of intense rewriting, even in news stories sometimes. Revising words that aren’t quite working never gets me as far as writing them again, in a form that does work. I never know why they come out better the second time, and I’ve always believed the goal was to get them that way on the first try. The rewriting can be overwhelming, stressful, and terrifying—especially if I don’t know, or admit I know, that it’s going to happen no matter what. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to hear someone say the rewriting is not something to avoid but expect, plan for, and use to the work’s advantage.
The third draft is about polishing, and Refuse to Be Done also has great advice on that, including lists of words on which to run a “find all” search in your manuscript and probably cut or replace most of them. (I wish I’d had them last year!) But that feels much farther away for me than the advice to, say, produce the generative draft by writing 500 words five days a week. The word target approach is nothing earth-shattering, but articulating its purpose as creating a story, rather than articulating a story I’m supposed to already understand, broke something open for me. I also loved Bell’s counterintuitive advice to hold off on some research, especially travel, until at least the end of the generative draft, so you “know what the novel want[s] to see” when you get there.
Much of the advice in Refuse to Be Done runs counter to how I learned to do journalism—or rather, how I tried to piece together how I thought everyone else was doing journalism. I never took a journalism class, or a writing class for that matter. I’ve only ever known my own process, and it never seemed to compare favorably to the more structured and regimented ones people are willing to talk about. Refuse to Be Done helped me see that maybe I do know what I’m doing, and that embracing the mess, uncertainty, and inefficiency might even help me do it better.
Further reading
Matt Bell also has an excellent writing craft newsletter, called No Failure, Only Practice. I especially liked this recent post about research.
