Throwaway Drafts

I don't want to use numbers for fear that they'll increase the pressure, but I will say that I've hit my goals recently and I've been pounding away at my story this week. I'm about to wrap up the first arc of the story, and I'm really excited about it.

This whole "starting from scratch" experience has taught me something that I think is valuable: the throwaway draft (should I capitalize? The Throwaway Draft?). This sort of thing gets covered in writing classes and books (in "Bird by Bird," a book I don't recommend, Ann Lamott has an entire chapter dedicated to "Shitty First Drafts"), but the idea is always "Don't worry about if it is good! Just write and fix it later!" With my next longer writing project, I'm going to approach it a bit differently -- deliberately write something with the intention of throwing it away. Maybe this won't apply to other types of writing, but for fantasy, it has been amazing. I fumbled through my first version of this story with too much of my focus on the "cool stuff" -- magic powers, non-standard environment, epic conflict -- and wound up with a lot of junk. I didn't pay enough attention to my characters, so everything that sounded cool in my head wound up being lame on the page. Nobody cares if a bunch of really boring people have cool powers and are trying to kill each other under two moons.

When I read over the story, a few months after finishing it, I hated it. I needed to get to know my characters better, so I spent some time revising them, giving them more interesting histories and real pain in their pasts that would drive them to make stupid decisions periodically. I axed some characters, brought in some new ones. Then I sat down to rewrite, and things were much better.

I have some ideas for being for deliberate about this in the future. I have no idea if they will be effective, but hey, it's worth a shot.

Babysitting
Pick a couple of characters and write a few pages of what would happen if they had to watch someone's kid(s) for an evening. This kind of exercise would separate the characters from the environment, which I think would help immensely in a fantasy story, since the environment can often be a distraction. Even though the situation would be weird, it seems like a great way to find a character's voice.

Grocery Shopping
This is similar to the first one, only I would take one character and have him or her try to pick out stuff to make for dinner. This would provide an opportunity to focus entirely on what goes on in the character's head -- how he reacts to food he hates, how he thinks about other shoppers, etc.

High School
Dear heavens I hated high school -- would my characters hate it? Would the villain shake down the hero for lunch money? Would the hero pine over Suzie in chem despite the fact that she's totally out of his league? This type of arrangement could provide benefits from the first two examples.

Visitors to the New World
Put "normal" people into your fantasy world. No, don't make them "aware" (as in, "Wow! We're in a strange land!") -- just don't make them any different than someone from the real world. This will help you get a grip on the implications of whatever fantastic element you've added to your environment to make it special, and will help you understand how your characters might need to be different to fit in properly (an exaggerated example of what I mean would be putting an oxygen-breathing human in a world that is entirely aquatic).

Obviously, revision will always be necessary, and I don't mean to imply that I'm trying to eliminate that step from the writing process. The point here is to help figure out your characters before you have to start dealing with how the events of the story change them. Notice I said "help" -- almost every time I write a new scene, I learn something about one of my characters, so I don't want to give anyone the impression that a few prewriting exercises are going to solve all of your story's problems. They won't. They're meant to provide a few more tools at the front end that will breathe life into your characters.