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Welcome to Finishing Your Book, Week 4. Today we are going to talk about how to re-enter your book when you need to draft new material though you haven nearly completed revising the book. I call this “advanced drafting.” First, let’s look at the anatomy of the writer.
I call the two parts of me that collaborate, often contentiously, on my writing “the storyteller” and “the brain.” The storyteller is the part of me that dreams. I mean that literally. When you go to sleep, you tell yourself stories for much of the night. Without the brain to tell you that you’ve never been somewhere or met someone or experienced something, your storyteller creates worlds and people and events willy-nilly. You don’t need to make a plan first, do research or keep a “To Dream” list by your bed. You don’t need to be in the mood, to feel inspired, or even to be on a comfortable mattress. You don’t even need to be 100% asleep. Have you ever had that experience where you are halfway asleep and things begin to shift, or you hear dialog that the person with you is not actually producing? As soon as the brain takes a snooze, the storyteller comes out to play.
The brain, on the other hand, likes a plan. The brain likes to be in control and wants things to make sense. Natalie Goldberg and others talk about the editor and the writer, but the brain can write, too, and truthfully, if you’ll let her, the storyteller can edit. They have different strengths and characteristics, rather than different jurisdictions.
At the advanced drafting level, you want to be able to call on your storyteller and your brain and really get them working together or at least alternating! You have a lot of advantages this late in the game. You know your characters well—well enough that they might surprise you! You know a lot about your story and even the symbolism that arises out of your setting and the props of your tale. You’ve established prose rhythms and dialog rhythms and character rhythms. You are no longer inventing from scratch or starting from memory alone. You have a hefty manuscript building a world.
Lean into that world. Now you can write with intention, weaving in the many threads you have at hand. Again, your brain can offer serious support for your storyteller at this advanced drafting stage. Here are some ways you might do that. Pick the ones that spark you or feel like they would work well:
1) Make a list of your main characters along with concise bios or lists of key characteristics.
2) Sketch out your character arcs with approximate page numbers, so you can figure out where each character is, in growth and in age and in any other variable that impacts the book, at any given moment you must re-enter.
3) Make a list of recurring settings and possible symbols. If there are key details you want to weave through the book, list those along side each setting and symbol.
4) Make a list (or incline) with your major plot points mapped out, as well as key subplots.
5) Make a note of how each scene moves—from positive to negative or from negative to positive. See that the direction or mood of the story changes with each scene.
Any other elements that are important to you deserve some notes, a map or a list. That way, when you turn everything back to your storyteller, you will know exactly where you are, and in that way you will, funnily enough, give yourself permission to go somewhere new and unexpected that still connects strongly to the book you have already written. Stay away from judging what you have already. It would be extremely difficult to get the distance needed to see the value of what you have created. Stay as neutral as you can in describing the world of your book.