For me the Revelatory Draft is the fun part of writing—sitting back with my notebook and letting the sentences unspool, doing a word count at the end of my session and posting the number of words into a spreadsheet and watching the numbers grow day by day. (A trued downside of revision for me is that my wordcount doesn’t mean as much as it did when doing the Revelatory Draft. I miss my charts and graphs).
When asked (and somebody usually does ask), I recommend that people write by hand, write old-fashionedly, with a pen or a pencil, on paper of some sort. I first heard a writer talk about this back years ago, when I was attending a summer workshop at the University of Montana. Novelist Ron Hansen was one of the instructors, and he said that when writing his first drafts he had abandoned computers for a pen and notebook. He said the when writing on a computer he was too tempted to write and rewrite and rewrite the same sentence over and over again, trying to get it perfect, unable to move on to the next sentence, the next scene, the next sequence, chapter, whatever. I felt a flash of recognition there, because I had noticed the same thing with my writing—I would get stalled on a sentence, trying my best to make it perfect, unable to see that the rest of the story was at that point, any point, unwritten. Of course, many people love writing on computers, and I’m not going to proscribe the ways you can best get words onto a page. Like so many things in writing, you have to find what works best for you.
But. No matter the brain-to-finger method, I do want to emphasize the importance of forward motion, the importance of keeping the ideal end of your narrative somehow in sight out there and working more-or-less in that direction until an Actual End presents itself. Don’t worry about the overall quality of your revelation, just get it revealed.
When asked (and somebody usually does ask), I recommend that people write by hand, write old-fashionedly, with a pen or a pencil, on paper of some sort. I first heard a writer talk about this back years ago, when I was attending a summer workshop at the University of Montana. Novelist Ron Hansen was one of the instructors, and he said that when writing his first drafts he had abandoned computers for a pen and notebook. He said the when writing on a computer he was too tempted to write and rewrite and rewrite the same sentence over and over again, trying to get it perfect, unable to move on to the next sentence, the next scene, the next sequence, chapter, whatever. I felt a flash of recognition there, because I had noticed the same thing with my writing—I would get stalled on a sentence, trying my best to make it perfect, unable to see that the rest of the story was at that point, any point, unwritten. Of course, many people love writing on computers, and I’m not going to proscribe the ways you can best get words onto a page. Like so many things in writing, you have to find what works best for you.
But. No matter the brain-to-finger method, I do want to emphasize the importance of forward motion, the importance of keeping the ideal end of your narrative somehow in sight out there and working more-or-less in that direction until an Actual End presents itself. Don’t worry about the overall quality of your revelation, just get it revealed.
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