#rough drafts suck

A couple things come to mind.

First: rough drafts always suck. This isn’t a criticism, it’s a fact of life. Getting the rough out and on paper is important because it’s the framework you’ll build into a finished story. But, everyone’s roughs start in some horrible place. Your definition of “sucks” may be different from mine, but comparing rough drafts to finished work can only end in tears. The only trick to dealing with this is remembering you’re just getting started, and the finished product will be vastly superior to where it began.

Learning to write is the process of rewriting. Once you’ve written your rough draft, go back, and start revising. Clean up the language that doesn’t quite work. Start connecting the events together.

Second: don’t be a fan. This may sound familiar from the fan-fiction answer we wrote last month, but, it holds true. As a writer, you need to look at other material and have the ability to evaluate it dispassionately. You need to be able to see what works, what doesn’t, and figure out why.

What works with The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger’s performance. What doesn’t is the part where it’s two incompatible films playing out side by side. There’s a Michael Mann inspired crime film that looks suspiciously similar to Heat at times, and occasionally a guy in a bat mask with anger management issues shows up to box dogs.

Third: It’s important to remember that different mediums result in fundamentally different kinds of art. This is also where comics and video games come into their own as distinct mediums. Things that work in prose rarely work in film and vise versa. Visual language, cinematography, and scoring in films don’t translate to prose. Comparing your work to something in another medium, especially when you’re starting can be discouraging, because they seem to have some kind of borderline sorcerous control over their writing. Well, they don’t, what they have is a different medium, which facilitates different kinds of storytelling.

Prose lets you sit inside your character’s head, dig into their insecurities and poke their understanding of the world. It also gives you the most control over the world. You can create a world that is slightly different from the real one in many small ways far more easily in prose than any other format.

If you want a 1980′s setting with electric cars, and pirate stories are the dominant genre in mass market comics, you can do that very easily in prose, it takes a couple paragraphs and you’re done. Try to do that in film or comics, and you’ll struggle. Having said that, I do love Watchmen, but the world building suffers for the medium.

Film gives you a lot of visual control. They’re also a collaborative project. Whatever you intended to do going in, it’s not coming out the other side. The film that you see is the result of the editors taking the footage and compiling it into a coherent film. The footage is the result of the actors getting together and running through the scripts over and over, looking for the best ways to make the scenes work. The actors are working from the shooting script, which is probably in revision while they’re working. The writer(s) working on the script may have had an idea, but now it’s in the hands of the director, the actors, and the entire production staff, who are working through the long and painful process of turning it into a finished product. Once you’ve seen the sausage factory of how films are made, you’ll be amazed that any coherent films exist.

Also, movies are about money. I don’t mean they’re about making money, that’s a happy accident artistically speaking. Films are (almost) always metered against how much money you have to finish the film. This means you might need to cut scenes, even fairly important ones, or alter them so you can actually stay under budget. Effects shots get dropped. Fantastical elements need to be rethought so they can be shot practically (that is on set without CGI) or cut altogether.

Television writing takes all the constraints of film, removes any time to think, cuts the budget to shoestring (even on major anchor series), and forces them to cough up a ~45-50 page script in less than a week. If you’ve ever looked at a show and thought, these writers are morons, well, no they’re probably not. They just didn’t have enough time to perfectly plan out the showrunner’s abstract meta-plot and meet their deadlines.

Comics provide the ability to provide a more interpretive visual language, at a cost of verbosity. They blend the realistic and fantasy in a way that print and film struggle with. Although it’s not explicitly a function of the medium, comics (and TV) do encourage some very tight dialog. Every word on the page is taking up space that replaces the art. With that consideration, you’re strongly encouraged to be as concise as possible.

Video games tie the audience to specific characters in a much more visceral way, and encourage a visceral empathy with the protagonists in a way that most media can’t even approach.

If you want to see how media depart from each other, read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, then watch Apocalypse Now, and play Spec Ops: The Line. Apocalypse Now and Spec Ops are both adaptations of Heart of Darkness, but all three are very distinct experiences. (And, not just because they replace Africa with Vietnam and post-apocalyptic Dubai, respectively.)

Fourth: it’s not a competition. If you’re comparing your work to someone who’s been writing for 30 years, and expecting to be on a level with them… “it can only end in tears.” Everyone started at the same place. We’ve all written awful fan-fiction which we’d commit to the deep if given the option.

You can’t skip that step, either. You learn from your own mistakes. As you get more experienced and confident, you start to learn from others’ as well.

Keep what works; get rid of the rest; never stop learning; never stop improving.

-Starke

Beginnings are always hard. That’s just one of those truths about writing. It's not a failure as a writer, whenever you're starting a project, the beginning will almost always be the hardest, and require the most revisions later.

When I was younger, I used to deal with beginnings by not writing them first. I’d start about 1/3 of the way through the piece, and then go back and actually rough draft the beginning after the fact.

There’s actually some decent arguments for this approach. Minor mistakes are more likely to be discarded by the reader without coloring the entire story, for them. You’re writing the part of the piece that needs to be strongest once you’re deeply invested in the work. But, you’re also drafting fragments of your story in isolation from the whole, and then trying to get everything to line up, which is a lot harder than it seems. It also creates a situation where, if you’ve screwed yourself, you won’t know until you’ve already invested a lot of time in the project. Finally, I’m not convinced it actually is easier.

You start with a little less pressure, but, in the end, you’re still going to have to suffer through the first portion you write, regardless. Just because it’s not chronologically first, won’t really save you.

The only reason this ever worked for me was because I always make sure I’ve got a fairly solid outline in my head before I start writing. And, back then, if I came up with a better idea once I was working on the early pieces, I was usually stuck with the original plan.

These days, I always write with one eye firmly on “what’s next.” When I’m writing an opening, I’m thinking about the followup, and in parts, what follows that. It takes a lot of pain out of writing the opening, but it’s also more time consuming.

Either way, starting on a piece is always going to be difficult, because you’re setting the tone for the story. The best advice, whatever your approach is; “everyone’s rough drafts suck.” It’s just a fact of life. Know where you’re going, set out, then clean it up in revisions once you’re working on your second pass. Also, be ready to revise the hell out of your opening, because it is the hardest thing to write, and it will take the most work, long after everything else is done.