Guest Post: Troubleshoot Your First Draft in One Pass
Today, we’ve got a post from novelist and writer’s writer Roz Morris. Roz is here to tell us about a tool she has developed to help her writing: The Beat Sheet. It allows you to boil your novel down into a manageable chunk and assess how well the whole thing works. The Beat Sheet not only can help guide revisions, but it will be a huge help as you polish your synopsis and query letter.
Now, I’ll turn it over to Roz so she can explain the tool and how it can help you troubleshoot your first draft.
Your first draft is probably a bit rough and chaotic, right? You know there are lots of things you need to fix. Where do you start? Is there a smart way to manage it all at once?
Personally I find if I just start at the beginning and feel my way, I don’t get the most out of the story. I might sort out the flow and the language, but I’m still not tackling the structure, or knowing if the pace is varied enough (or if it varies too much), if the crescendos build and are in the right places or if some of my threads disappear. Indeed some characters may fade off into the background and never return to complete their stories! Or other story threads that are lovely may be irrelevant and should be saved for another book. It may take several passes to sort all these problems out – and some of them I simply won’t see unless I stand back.
So I make a document that assesses the entire manuscript in as summarised a form as possible. Hollywood scriptwriters do something similar – they call it the beat sheet. That sounds cool to me so I call it that too – although I’ve developed it more. Not only is it a way to assess your novel at a glance, it can be used as a mission statement for your revisions.
I’ve used it for short novellas and big, sprawling literary epics. It makes the most daunting revision job into a piece of cake, no matter how long or complex the book is.
It’s quite fun to do – you write a short summary of each scene, assessing its purpose in the story. You use coloured pens for each story thread or group of characters, emoticons as shorthand for the mood of a scene, leave a column down the side so that you can work out the timeline with pinpoint accuracy. You use another colour to draw in where you’re going to swap scenes around, add new ones in or adjust the content. (For more detail, see The Beat Sheet – Your at-a-glance revision blueprint)
It might take you a day or two, and the result might look like childish scribble, but it’s a seriously useful piece of work.
You can make all sorts of creative decisions with the beat sheet. For instance the emoticons might indicate you’ve got too much tension building – so you might rework the order of scenes to give the reader a breather. Or you might rewrite one of the tense scenes to make it lighter. You might feel the narrative has got bogged down in a repetitive loop – and looking at the beat sheet will show you where you can trim the flab.
You can use it to assess character development too – as you will see from the emoticons and your summary of the scenes if your people are being put under more pressure and changing the way they behave.
Another great thing about the beat sheet is it also puts me in a positive frame of mind about my first draft. Any problems I come across, I put on the beat sheet and figure out what to do about them. Quite often, it will be clear whether I need to reorder, delete – or maybe expand.
Once I’ve played with the story on the beat sheet, I’m confident it will work on a structural level. Then I can dive in and edit with purpose and pleasure. I know where I’m going and I’ve got all the information I need to bring the best out of the story.
Roz Morris is a novelist and ghost writer who provides critiques and consulting services to her fellow writers. You can find out more about Roz and the books she’s written, including the recent Nail Your Novel, at Dirty White Candy.
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Categories: Uncategorized, writing