Writing Ramble: In Defense of Second Drafts

Recently my friend Andy Knighton wrote an excellent blog post titled Surviving the Second Draft, which did exactly what it said on the tin, offering some sensible tips on how to struggle through that fearsome first redraft.

I say, "fearsome first redraft" - but second drafts are my absolutely favourite part of the writing process.  I commented to that effect on Andy's post, smugly pointing out that "you take something that’s kind of a mess and make it into something really good, what’s not to like?" and Andy made the sensible point that not everyone likes to admit they messed up the first time, never mind having to think about setting right what once went wrong.

This is very true.  And if I think back, I know full well that there was a time when I felt the same.  First drafts were sacred brain-goop, the raw outpourings of an unfettered subconscious.  Second drafts were weird and icky, a process of picking over something best left unpicked.  And third drafts were - well, why would you have a third draft, when you'd nailed it the first time, then made yourself miserable trying to find faults in something that was just fine to begin with?  As much as I might not want to relive such early writing traumas, I understand.

Still.  The fact remains that I was wrong.  Seconds drafts are awesome.

I guess that when you're starting out, the first draft has to be fun, otherwise there'd never be any end product.  And second drafts are the natural antithesis of that; they're about conceding your mistakes, which is not generally considered an enjoyable act.  Still.  If you're relatively new to writing then I promise you, second drafts are where it's at.  And not only is that the case but it's a good thing.

Why?  Partly because it takes away some of that awful, mind-crushing fear that first putting finger to keyboard - and then doing the same again and again and again until you actually have something resembling a story - involves.  Embracing second drafts is to admit that your first drafts aren't perfect, and never could have been, were never meant to be.  It's to accept your own fleshy weakness, your flimsy-brainedness, and to comprehend that human beings create processes for a reason.  The reason  second drafts exist is because you will never, ever get everything right the first time.  Maybe you'll make a million typos.  Maybe you'll settle for third person when your protagonist needed to be telling their story themselves.  Maybe you'll fling about adverbs with wild abandon and forget that speech tags are a thing.  Or perhaps it will be a combination of all those failings and more.

But it's okay.  The second draft is your safety net.

Here's the thing: second drafts are the point where you get to get things right.  Inevitably my first drafts disappoint and unsettle me.  There are nuggets of awesome, but they're hidden amongst great swathes of mediocrity, not to mention clunky language and inexplicable spelling.  They're the point where I wonder if I haven't maybe found myself in the wrong business, when after all I'd be much better suited to interior design or inventing new breakfast cereals.  But then I remember that clunky language can be tightened, spelling mistakes can be spotted, and really, just about any other first draft mistake can be fixed too.  Sometimes it's a matter of tidying and sometimes it's a matter of immense effort - I say this as someone who not so long ago changed the tense of an entire novel! - but the crucial point is that the end result is always better.

And that, ultimately, is the joy of the second draft.  The first time around you get to be intermittently good, maybe even intermittently great in small doses.  The second time around, if you're willing to put in the same level of energy all over again, you can nail it.  And then there's the third draft, which in my head is usually called the polish draft now, for obvious reasons: that's where the story begins to genuinely shine.  But the first step, I think, is just to get past that hurdle of thinking of the second draft as a chore, a hardship or some assault on your artistic integrity.  You want to tell a story?  You want it to be amazing?  Then the biggest advantage you have is that you don't have to be perfect the first time through.

Hemingway: A Review

This is not, I should emphasize from the off, a review of author Ernest Hemingway.  Because that would be awfully presumptuous, and anyway, it's bad form to review dead people.  Although if it was a review of Ernest Hemingway I'd give him a hearty four and a half stars out of five.  Here's a clip from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris to justify that score:

I'd also give Midnight in Paris four and a half stars, incidentally.

But this isn't a review of Ernest Hemingway or Midnight in Paris, it's a review of an application called Hemingway, which you can find here.  Hemingway the application is a free web app (though there's a purchasable desktop version that appears to do more or less the same thing) that describes itself as "like a spellchecker, but for style."  Basically, you copy into it or write a section of text and Hemingway judges that text according to five parameters.  Four of these get immediately identified with some neat colour coding: hard to read and very hard to read sentences are marked in yellow and red respectively, phrases with simpler alternatives are purple, adverbs are pale blue and incidents of passive voice are green.  Lastly, Hemingway assigns a readability stat based on what I assume to be the US school grading system.

This is helpful, without a doubt.  In fact, ever since I discovered Hemingway a couple of weeks ago I've been using it more or less constantly.  There's something awfully brilliant about colour coding: paste in a paragraph and you'll see either a panic-inducing splatter of primary shades or a reassuringly plain background.  It makes for an intuitive insight into what's working and what isn't; go mad with the adverbs, inadvertently phrase half your story in the passive voice, and Hemingway will let you know about it in no time at all.

Which is not to say you won't want to punch it.  I spend approximately sixty percent of my time with Hemingway wanting to punch it, and I'm a fairly laid back sort; your personal mileage may vary.  The thing is, as much as everything that it's pointing out is useful in theory, it's really not that bright.  Unlike more sophisticated tools, it has no structural or contextual understanding of what you've written, and works off hard and fast rules and what appear to be fairly simple metrics.

Take adverbs, for example.  Here's what Wikipedia has to say about adverbs:

An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, noun phrase, clause, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as how?, in what way?, when?, where?, and to what extent?

Wow, Wikipedia, you make adverbs sound pretty awesome!  But here's what Hemingway has to say about adverbs:

ADVERBS ARE THE ANTICHRIST AND YOU SHOULD DELETE THEM, EVERY LAST ONE, BEFORE ALL GOODNESS IS SUCKED FROM THE WORLD AND SATAN RULETH FOREVER!!!!

4½ / 5

Okay, that's not what Hemingway says.  I'm paraphrasing.  What it actually does is tell you how many adverbs you have and then demand that you remove most or all of them.  Regardless of their function.  Because it doesn't really get that adverbs serve a ton of different purposes.

All of which is to say, you should totally check out Hemingway, it's a great tool, named after a great writer, who was impersonated in a great Woody Allen Film.  (Perhaps the last great Woody Allen film?)  But ... you should treat what it tells you with a pretty big pinch of salt.  Frankly, all of its categories are about as dumb as those poor adverbs; its idea of what constitutes a hard to read sentence will have most authors wincing on a regular basis.  On the other hand, if an entire paragraph turns red then you might want to consider reining things in a little.

This brings me a wider point that's a good one to wrap up on: though there are certainly a ton of great answers out there on the subject of writing, and no end of neat tools, none of them are ever entirely, one hundred percent right.  A big part of being a successful writer, in my experience, is learning whatever you can from a particular source and then knowing when to disregard it.  With that in mind, Hemingway is a pretty great editing tool; used with restraint, it definitely has the potential to make your writing life easier.  Just don't altogether trust it, and certainly don't rely on it exclusively, that's all I'm saying.

Help Rosarium, Help Cthulhu

It's been a while since I've talked about my horror / sci-fi comic book miniseries C21st Gods, so let's redress that a little, shall we?  After all, there's never been a better time to do so - but more on that in a moment.


The first bit of big news is that, after some hiccups last year, the project is now fully up and running again in the hands of a new artist: the hugely talented Anthony Summey.

Anthony is brilliant.  I  mean, he's a brilliant artist, you can see that for yourself just from the logo there, but he's also been brilliant to work with, and an absolute professional.  I've seen inked pages for about half of the first issue now, and they're marvelous, not to mention a great representation of what's got to be one of the better scripts I've written.  I don't know, perhaps this is the year for projects coming back from the brink of death, but I'm confident that when this thing hits the shelves later in the year it's going to look great.

Which brings us round to why I'm mentioning this now, and why C21st Gods is happening at all - which is to say, Bill Campbell and his publishing house Rosarium.

There's a lot to like about what Rosarium's been doing these last couple of years, but one thing that stands out above all others.  Inclusivity in publishing is one of those subjects that lots of people talk about and very few people act on in anything but the most surface ways.  One of the rare exceptions - perhaps the most major exception right now - is Rosarium.  Rosarium has inclusivity in the very marrow of its bones, and that's led to a range of creators and of books that you're unlikely to find anywhere else in today's market; these are varied and exciting works by varied and exciting people, and it's an honour, frankly, to be a part of that line-up.

And Rosarium has been growing fast.  I mean, even in the short time I've been involved, that much has been obvious.  With projects like Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality, they've grown into a force to be taken seriously - hence some major attention and a couple of awards being thrown their way.  Now Rosarium is perched on the verge of great things, and that means needing money, and that means a fund-raising campaign - in this case, Indiegogo.

Now, I try not to badger anyone to throw their money at things here on the blog, even things I've written, because, hey. we're all broke, right?  But I hope people will have a look at this and maybe think about hurling a little cash Rosarium's way.  If only because most of the awards are books, and Rosarium do great books.  Get something brilliant to read and help a publisher that's actively making the industry a better place flourish more than it's already doing?  I feel okay with asking people to do that.  With that in mind, you can find the details of Rosarium's Indiegogo campaign here.

Eastercon 2016

The good news?  This year's Eastercon was better than last year's.  The bad news?  It was still just okay.

This time around, at least there was only the one huge problem, but it was a pretty big huge problem.  The venue chosen was hopelessly unsuitable.  You know the one thing you need for a conference?  Big rooms.  And, judging by what was on offer, the Hilton Manchester Deansgate had nothing that came even close.  It was sheer dumb luck on my part, though, that the only events I was really interested in on the program were relegated to one of the tiniest, which had seating for an entire twenty one people.  I know.  I counted.  Even the dealer's room had to be split into two parts - one of which got lumped in with the noticeably shrunken art show.  Oh, and the green room was a corridor.

Speaking of corridors ... now that I think, a conference venue actually needs two things: you need a bar area where people can sit down, too.  Because if people can't get into your events because the rooms are all too small, they need to have somewhere to go and chill that isn't basically a big hallway with a bar at one end.  And maybe I'd be feeling a lot more positively towards this year's Eastercon if I hadn't spent most of the Saturday suffering with back problems and not being able to get a seat to relieve them.

It's a shame, and I almost feel bad for pointing it out, because everything else was at the very least not bad.  The Hilton was a crummy venue on many levels - I didn't try the food, but I watched enough people turning green to know I'd made the right call - but the staff were absolutely brilliant, friendly and chatty and just generally really nice.  Same goes for the organisers; they seemed like splendid people and were trying hard to make things work.  The program wasn't exactly pushing any envelopes, but there was some solid stuff on there, and I can see how, if there'd been space for more than a fraction of the attendees, that could have worked out well.  There was a good range of events, too, with most slots offering at least something.  Even the bar prices weren't crazy, at least compared to London events.

Still, I don't altogether understand how anyone could have looked at the Hilton Deansgate and thought it would make a good venue.  I mean, I get that this was a rescue bid and all, but surely those two points up there - decent-sized rooms for panels, space to sit - are pretty obvious?  I don't want to diminish how hard it must be to arrange a conference on this scale, let alone at late notice, but looking at this solely as a punter, the fact remains that that shouldn't be my problem.  Eastercon isn't the cheapest of con's; it needs to be better than it's been over the last three years if people are going to keep attending.

Next year sees another rescue bid and another big city venue.  There's not much reason to think it will be an improvement.  2018, on the other hand, takes us to Harrogate and an event that already seems much better planned than anything we've come to expect of late, so that at least feels hopeful.  Still, the fact remains that Eastercon isn't in the best of shape.  To my mind, the best thing that's happened to Fantasycon recently is the fact that it had to take a year out to accommodate World Fantasy.  When it returned it did so bigger and much better.  From an outsider's perspective, Eastercon seems to be in a state of permanent crisis, and once you reach that point, the absolutely best thing is to back away and take stock.  To my mind, that would be the thing to do now: step back, take a deep breath, listen to some of the criticisms you're getting year after year and return stronger.  Eastercon definitely has a meaningful place in the Con scene, it has its own vibe and it's a good one.  There was plenty to like this year, and given room to breath it might have been great.  Here's hoping, then, for better to come.