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We grouped some of his
sentences together and called some of the groups
paragraphs. These we put at the top of the page in some
kind of order -- that wasn't necessarily permanent.
Ordering the sentences within each
paragraph took more time. My young writer was fascinated with
the process because he could already see more splatters
that would belong in some of these groups. We seemed to
have all night so I let him sit at the keyboard so it
was his fingers being worn to the nub.
- Next we began picking out
some of his precious little thought splatters and
nestled them in with the sentences or with the
paragraphs, when they fit.
- When this process was finished
we turned our attention to the remaining splatters and,
sure enough, many of them belonged together in
little groups of
their own.
- They had remained hidden all that time. Now
we had them hogtied and put them on the new page we were
building, down at the bottom.
The writer was already
astounded at what we had produced. “Ive never written
anything this good before!” he gushed 3 or 4 times.
- Oh, WOW! Is that right?
- I
wonder why he hasn't.
- Well, ownership battles like that
arise all the time.
- I let the matter of ownership go
unchallenged and moved aside.
- He had also assumed ownership of the major
revisions I had made for him in his first two books.
- My
name hadn't even been mentioned in the “credits to those
who helped me most” sections.
We had saved our original
document under an assumed name,
- then immediately saved
it again as: assumed name #2.
- We did this so we
wouldn't lose that first burst of writing splendor.
- Our
changes to #2 will be extensive – therefore, we
will want to go
back to that first well in the wilderness (otherwise
tagged as version #1)
- and produce as many other
gushers as that well may produce.
#2 is what we began our revision work
on.
- I studied it for a long moment and the impression
grew that the poor boy was fantasizing about some girl
he had just met.
- Being a happily married man with 4 kids
he was naturally hiding this from himself
- and hoping to
hide it from the world by writing this document in an
abstract manner.
- “One can,”
- “One should,”
- “One will
always,” etc..
- Putting on my “wise old writer” look, I
said:
- “You know, this document would really be improved
automatically if we just wrote it to someone
special.
- Maybe to a unique young lady.
- Let's think about
this, what name would go with a unique young lady that
words like this might be written to?”
He gave my face a sharp,
raking glance but, guilelessly, I stared right back at
him. Finally he said,
“How about -- Shannon?
Would that
name work?”
- “Sounds like a splendid name to me.
- Now
we're going to put this girl's -- I mean lady's --
- name
into this document for no other reason than to polarize
your thoughts as you write and reassemble it.
- When we
are done we can pull her name out
- if we want to
- and it
won't hurt the rest of the document one bit.”
Sure enough, once we had polarized
the piece with the
girl's name inserted at strategic points
- it was easy
for my young writer to see some of the changes that
needed to be made,
- when I pointed them out to him.
- In
his mind the structure of the whole document shifted,
- kind of like a parallelogram being shifted back to make
a square;
- he saw it in a whole new light.
- “Yeah, this is
what I'm trying to say.”
- Scribble, scribble, scribble.
Silver Bell Options
Writers have some
incredible options when it comes to production after their
first draft is finished.
- Sometimes “One can,” “One
should,” “One will always,”
- really is the best way to
go.
- However, you should also realize that
just by
shifting the viewpoint you can produce an entirely
different document.
- Let's take the classic titled
“Green Mansions” for
example.
- It starts off with the viewpoint of a character
known as “I” as the main character
- and then introduces a man
of mystery that he has made friends with.
- After several
thousand words our “I” character drops out of the book
- and the man of mystery begins telling his own story and,
by golly, he provides this main character the name of “I” as
well.
That's one too many “I”s,
don't you think?
- Green Mansions is in the public domain
now..
- That means that you and I can change it into any new form
we might want to
- and even copyright our new product
- in the same
way that Walt Disney seized upon the story of Snow
White”
- and made a cartoonized movie out of it that he
copyrighted and made millions from.
The simple way to improve
Green Mansions is by slashing the whole introduction out
of the book. It reads just as well without that first
several thousand words.
- The first “I” is gone
- and the
second “I” becomes the dominant character of the
whole book.
- Long Live “I”.
Another option..
- We can also change the “I”
character to “He”
- and this will shift the poles of the
story to another new slant
- so that you see new ways of
presenting the same story material,
- and you will probably even find whole
new packages to add to the document.
What about an “it” in our
document's viewpoint?
- That's fine. Green Mansions is a
quasi-mystical novel anyway.
- We can put an “it” into
place,
- hovering over our hero from the very first.
- It is
nudging him out into the jungle to nurse our keening
jungle girl back to health and back into the actions of
life.
- Would this polarize the novel
in another direction?
- Yes, it would (or
could) also add purpose to the novel
- so that these subsequent
events would no longer be just a series of accidents.
Try This At Home!
Would the viewpoint and
storyline of your material have to be changed
- if you
turned it into a movie format,
- or into a play?
- You betchum.
As
I said in the beginning,
save that first version
- because
then you can always come back to it
-- if polarizing messes
everything up,
- and you can always produce dozens of new
dimensions from it.
- All you have to do is change
one of the viewpoints or any of
the options to give your document a
brand new North Pole.
Shannon, will thank you for
it. |
