The Last Draft

by Sandra Scofield

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LAST DRAFT

  Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, winner of a Best Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. She has written a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a book of essays about her family, Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman’s Life. Her most recent book of fiction is Swim: Stories of the Sixties. She is also the author of a previous book on the craft of writing, The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer. Scofield is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and has for many years taught at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She lives in Missoula, Montana, and Portland, Oregon.

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  New York, New York 10014

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  Copyright © 2017 by Sandra Scofield

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Scofield, Sandra Jean, 1943– author.

  Title: The last draft : a novelist’s guide to revision / Sandra Scofield.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032030 (print) | LCCN 2017041432 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705084 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131359 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—Technique. | Fiction—Authorship. | anuscripts—Editing. | Creative writing. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Composition & Creative Writing. | REFERENCE / Writing Skills. | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Editing & Proofreading.

  Classification: LCC PN3365 (ebook) | LCC PN3365 .S38 2017 (print) | DDC 808.3—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032030

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Cover design: Jennifer Wang

  Version_1

  I love the flowers of afterthought.

  —BERNARD MALAMUD

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  I. The Novel: An Overview

  THE NOVEL CONTINUUM

  A REVIEW OF NARRATIVE ELEMENTS

  II. Revision of a Novel Draft:

  Discussion and Exercises

  STAGES OF REVISION

  1. A Close Look

  Description

  Assessment

  2. The Plan

  Summaries

  Core Scenes

  Lines of Threads

  3. The Process

  4. The Polish

  RESOURCES

  Recommended Books on Craft

  Lessons from Model Novels

  Sample Scenarios

  Storyboarding

  Scene Template

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Why you, why me, why this book?

  We’re an odd lot, novelists. Obsessive. Why else does someone launch a project that consumes so much time and holds out such a wavering promise of reward? I wrote my first three novels in deep night—the only time I had—and I used to put things away (in a dish bucket, set against the kitchen wall) in a tired heave of sadness, as if I might never pick them up again, as if my fledgling world might never be real. And of course it never was, because that’s a large part of the siren call of the novel: Come hither and create your own world. Put what you know and believe and want into story. Defy the randomness of real life; make meaning. This is a long-haul project and it is so much a part of who you are, you can’t imagine not doing it, not even if it takes years.

  Maybe you, like me, write in your hidey-hole and people who know you have no idea how much you’ve taken on. Maybe you’ve found a workshop or a graduate program to help you in your endeavor. Either way, you must know by now that you have a world of figuring out to do.

  Just know this: You are uniquely you, and the novel you write is one nobody else can.

  I’ve written seven novels. That doesn’t count the first one; I spent years, only to discover when it was done that I was sick of it. (I had learned a lot, though.) It doesn’t count the one I lost. (I thought I stored it in the linen closet, but it wasn’t there when I searched for it.) It doesn’t count drafts, that’s for sure. It doesn’t count false starts (a box of them), or the ones I’ve been writing in my head for a decade while I tell myself I’m done with novels. (I have been writing other things, but this book has stirred some ideas.)

  I’ve read shelves and shelves of novels. Hundreds of reviews. (I’ve written them, too.) Stacks of criticism. Biographies and memoirs of writers. But what matters to the present subject is this: I have immersed myself in the struggles of at least two hundred aspiring novelists, many in one-week workshops in summer writing festivals over twenty-plus years, and others in semester-long or year-long mentorships. I immerse myself in outlines and drafts. These writers have put themselves out there in a scary, exciting way. It has been my privilege to help them find new insights and fresh resolve. There is among aspiring writers an incredible range of interests, backgrounds, sense of story, and confidence, but there are many things they have in common. They are readers. They are intrigued by human nature. They are dogged.

  Since 2005 I have been teaching in low-residency master’s programs, mentoring students in workshops and online. I have been coach and cheerleader. I have tried to understand what each writer is striving for, and to help that writer reach her goal. I have constructed exercises to guide the shaping of a manuscript. The opportunity to work one-on-one has been as instructive to me as it has been to my students, and workshops have been exhilarating and enlightening.

  One day it dawned on me that every summer, every semester, I have reinvented the wheel. Now, going through my teaching materials, I see that, however I may have recast notes, talks, exercises, and guidelines, there are consistent themes. I want to share what I have learned in my writing and teaching life, with special gratitude for the generosity of so many writers over so many years.

  First drafts: What it takes to get it down

  You can find many books to help you produce the first draft of a novel, especially if you subscribe to a popular theory of story much loved by screenwriters. Their strategy of structuring with acts, journeys, plot points, and arcs seems to be ratified by the success of many commercial movies, but is less helpful in developing deep story. If you want to review the basics of screenplay structure, you should read Syd Field, who popularized the model thirty years ago. You can also find genre-specific plot guides by writers like Orson Scott Card (fantasy), James Frey (mystery), Regina Brooks (young adult), and many others. I offer my own way of seeing a writer’s work, assuming that most writers accumulate advice the way painters accumulate brushes. If you are writing a first draft, the principles and strategies
discussed in this book can help you think about your story. Just don’t get caught up in too much self-criticism too early on. Use my ideas as prompts, not as prescription. If you do use a plot scheme to develop a first draft, this book can help you deepen your manuscript by refining your vision and intention for the story.

  My advice is short and simple.

  You should feel driven by a story you want to tell, even if you don’t know every nuance of it.

  You must be able to live with the ambiguity of the enterprise.

  You must have a commitment to a schedule of writing.

  No one can teach you how to write a perfect first draft

  If you can say, Yes, I’m up to that, and you are just beginning, you may do best by ignoring instruction, at least until your dream is on the page. Free from rules, you may discover you have something in you nobody else has thought of. What rules did Markus Zusak ignore, writing The Book Thief, with Death as the narrator? Or Kate Atkinson, with the dazzle of her innovative Life After Life, in which her characters live more than one life? Amor Towles painted thirty years of Russian history in the confines of a single setting, a hotel, in A Gentleman in Moscow.

  However much you think you know your story, however much you love it, allow yourself the freedom of discovery. Think of yourself as solving a mystery. What if? Why? Be wary of judging your work too soon. Sticking with a novel means going forward, not round and round. I say that even though I myself am a slow, deliberate writer at the sentence level. I don’t pour out pages; I feel as if every line tells me something about what the next line has to be. But I also don’t worry over the pages I’ve already written until I have a substantial draft. I learned early on that I could end up trying to perfect passages that don’t belong in the novel at all. Or I could lose my urgency to discover what next. I learned to jump ahead when I felt stymied. I started two of my novels in the middle.

  Keep in mind that a first draft may be a kind of fishing expedition, a mess of a manuscript. You may not be ready to leap to revising. “First draft” should be thought of as a canopy of writing, holding however many drafts it takes to get you to the place where you feel you have grasped the story and put it on the page. You have to know how it ends. You have to know what it means.

  The “first draft” of my first published novel was 1,084 pages long. It took about fourteen months to write. (Remember, those were typewriter days.) I wrote ferociously and joyously. Then I had to figure out how to define reasonable parameters for the novel, and when I cut it, I discovered a huge imbalance between what I had said the most about and what I’d skimmed over. I made a painstaking outline by hand, on lined paper. There were no word processors. I had to start over with fresh paper in a typewriter. That was what it meant to revise. (I kept the boxes that held that draft in the disused cabinets over the refrigerator for many years, until they were archived. And I looked at them from time to time, a reminder of what I did, what I can do.)

  When I wrote what I thought was the finished manuscript of More Than Allies, my perspicacious agent told me she liked a minor character in the story the best of all—and that character became one of the two main characters in a total rewrite. I learned to stay fluid, patient, open, and determined. Every stage has its hurdles—and its rewards.

  Have fun finding your way

  You might want to toss a chapter and start over. Fine. You might want to try out a different point of view. You could discover your heavy drama is a comedy after all. You might realize you need a lot more background (setting, history) built into the story (a common concern); or you might realize that your research is clogging the manuscript’s arteries. Insight comes when you are immersed in the story, and you then have to decide whether to go back or keep going. I’m inclined to say keep going but make lots of notes about your prospective changes. You have to tell yourself that the most important thing is to get enough story down that you have something to work with; you will know more with every page you write; you can change things in the next draft.

  Once you have that first full draft, you are on a different plane of writing. You’ve done a lot of stumbling and fretting, but you’ve figured out a story and you have this product, written out from beginning to end. Congratulations. Now you are ready for the next step. Unless you can do it in one go. There are writers who don’t revise full drafts, but I think that for them revising is a stream of higher consciousness.

  It is instructive and fascinating to read about Gustave Flaubert’s writing; he was a man in agony, start to finish. He wrote letters to his friends saying that he hated what he was writing, that he had spent days on a paragraph, and so on. It seems clear to me that he had a very strong sense of his story from the beginning (I’m thinking of Madame Bovary), but achieving what he had in mind was incredibly demanding because his standards were so high. He spent five years writing the novel, his first. He wrote expansively, then cut, as he progressed.

  When he got to the end of his “first draft,” which was the complete novel, he had performed surgery, acrobatics, diplomacy, psychology, and artistry on every page. And he had written the first modern novel.

  John Steinbeck wrote a journal about how he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. It’s called Working Days and you can see why: He wrote five days a week, all day, from June to October 1938, about two thousand words a day. He griped and grumbled, full of self-doubt and self-pity, but he had his head down and his pencil on the paper (his wife was his typist). I think he, like Flaubert, could do a one-draft wonder because every sentence was produced from deep thought. He was driven by an urgency about his subject, and he had done a lot of research. He didn’t start writing from scratch by any means.

  Bernard Malamud, on the other hand, said when asked how many drafts he typically wrote, “Many more than I call three.”

  Fast is fast, but is it good?

  So many will say, Just get it down—work intuitively and quickly. I can’t write fast, so I can’t evaluate this approach. Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life), famous for encouraging unself-conscious, uncritical first drafts, has made it clear that she also does a lot of restructuring and revising later on. You have to find your own way. If you have had the story in your mind for a long time, your first draft might feel like you are pouring it onto the page. If the story feels like a mystery you want to solve, it will probably go more slowly. The writer Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), whose novels are marvelously varied, has said that she likes to think things through pretty thoroughly before she starts writing, whereas her friend, the novelist Elizabeth McCracken (The Giant’s House: A Romance), doesn’t think a thing of changing names, histories, and plotlines as she writes. Think of the first draft as close to the chest: It’s yours alone.

  What I do know is that, whether you crawl through your draft or you write it out as fast as you can type, you have to have the story on the page, start to finish, before you can evaluate it. It’s important to stay open to surprises and unbothered by dead ends. This isn’t the time to make contracts with yourself, like so many pages a day or the first draft by Christmas. Dedicated time is the one thing you do have to promise yourself. A lot will change in the writing. Later, you will come back to the same questions, the same advice, the same exercises, and find you have gone somewhere altogether different from where you were headed. That’s just fine. That’s writing. The real book might appear in the margins of your draft. You can’t revise what you haven’t written down.

  Rewriting

  If your first draft feels clumsy or underdeveloped to you, you may just need to write another one, telling the story more fully, or telling it another way. At least now you have a story. (But before you embark on another two or three hundred pages, I urge you to try a different strategy for telling the story, and that is to develop scenarios, a strategy I discuss later on.)

  I think of rewriting as something you do in an early stage of your writing project, when you find yourself g
iving up on the direction you’ve taken a scene, so you delete it and start over. You hate a paragraph. You change a character’s name. You describe a setting and then decide to move the action. You’re figuring it out for the first time. Most rewriting in a first draft is still intuitive, even fumbling. Computers have robbed us of a great pleasure: crumpling a page and throwing it across the room.

  If you write a draft, or much of it, and realize that this is absolutely not the story you had in mind, don’t try to salvage anything except the thinking you did. Don’t save that perfect paragraph. Start over. Write a new first draft. Whatever shows up again should do so because it is right at the moment that calls for it, not because you didn’t want to waste it. Also, if you initially have in mind that there will be a second draft, you feel freer to move along, to follow your intuition in breaking the story ground.

  Are you ready to revise?

  I’m supposing that readers picked up this book because of the title. You have written a draft, or most of one. You know you have work to do. I hope you already know that you don’t want to jump right to fix-it mode, in which you labor over words and sentences, fix scenes, check your spelling. There’s other work to be done first. You want your story to be tighter and yet more generous. You want your characters to be memorable. You want the form to fit the story like the setting for a gem. Do I dare suggest, you want your novel to say something fresh about the world? To be special?

  Revision is a significantly different process because you work from a complete manuscript rather than a moving platform. Also, there is more analytical work in revision, more deliberate application of craft. I suggest you follow a process in which a period of analysis and condensed writing gives you a stronger story that moves you closer to the final version, without multiple full-length exploratory drafts. You can go back and forth between thinking about the story (re-seeing) and writing the story. It just seems too inefficient and painful to write a draft, read it and weep, and then set in writing another one, hoping it will be better. I think that’s why so many novels don’t get finished. The writer wears out or loses enthusiasm. Mind you, if you do have the heart for it—rewriting start to finish—it’s probably the right thing for you to do. Rewriting is a more organic process than revision. Total immersion will take you back into the mine.