Tag: First drafts

Get It Right Next Time

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There have been times when the first draft was nothing more than a prop to hang a few jokes on, but hey ho! you know, at least it got it out of my system, which is just as well because I really don’t want it festering around in there.  Without a little quiet attention and at least three different colours of ink, first drafts should never reach the public eye: they are what a writer thinks he wants to say before he has actually thought about saying it.  They are Donald Trump with the filter off – which is just Donald Trump, really.  People may say that it is good to see what is really rattling around inside your head before you have had the chance to tidy it up, but I have to disagree – and I will tell you why just as soon as I have thought it through…

Generally – truth be told – I no longer tinker with these things anything like as much as I used to: my posts are shorter and not really intended to sound like a polished ‘stand-up’ routine.  They are more of a porthole into my brain, and it is the nature of portholes that very few look in to them from out.  I do occasionally, in preparing for publication, drop in an odd ‘it has just occurred to me’ line, but mostly I just plump the cushions.  I am a fairly efficient editor, which means that I do not appear anything like as dysfunctional on the page as I feel.  My main issue with my own first drafts is that I do have a tendency to bail out of them when I start to get bored, which can occur at any time.  A swift excision of all pompous posturing, self-pitying twaddle and repetition normally means that I am left with just about the right amount of words to bolt some kind of logical conclusion onto it all and pretend that was my intention all along… and repetition.

I work in a room lined with CD’s.  Many CD releases these days contain the demos (musical first drafts) of the better known songs and they are, almost without exception, vastly inferior to the finished article – what would be the point of recording anything properly if that was not the case?  Oh dear, and the number of CD’s that now include ‘Previously Unreleased’ half-finished (because everyone realised that they weren’t good enough in the first place) tracks…  Per-lease…  I really don’t want to hear what nobody thought was even good enough to make it through into a second draft.  I’ve got notebooks full of such shite.

Who would want to hear MLK’s address as it was before he thought “I know, I’ll start with ‘I have a dream…’”; how interested would you be in an early incarnation of Dr Watson’s diary before Sir Conan-Doyle had the bright idea of dropping Sherlock Holmes into the mix; who would have watched Fawlty Towers before they put the Major in?  (OK, the last one wasn’t a great example.)

It is possible to overwork things – I know, I do it all the time – but the solution is simple: scrap it all and start again.  The idea is still there.  I remember reading that Spike Milligan (although it could have been Eric Sykes or even Graham Chapman of Monty Python) never bothered to make copies of scripts because if they were lost, they would just write them again.  Imagine having a head so full of ideas.

I keep almost everything I write.  I either use it or forget it (alright, I might occasionally go back and borrow one of my own jokes – although they seldom improve for the re-telling) but I never throw things away.  Why?  I have no idea.  Perhaps when I have tripped up my last imaginary kerb, cobbled together my very last sentence and sent my English tutor a-spinning in his grave for one last time, my future archivist will wander along and think, ‘Look at all this.  I wonder why he never finished it?’  And then he’ll read it and he will know.  His question will change.  ‘How did he ever function in the real world?  Why was he even allowed into the real world?  If this was the first draft of his life, thank God he ran out of jokes before he got onto the second…’  Because we all get so little right at the first attempt.  And then he’ll turn on the shredder and do what I should have done years ago, because nobody wants to read an unedited life…

Life is a liar yeah life is a cheat
It’ll lead you on and pull the ground from underneath your feet
No use complainin’, don’t you worry, don’t you whine
Cause if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time, next time…  Get It Right Next Time – Gerry Rafferty

First Drafts

Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash

N.B. I wrote this and then couldn’t work out quite where to fit it in, until it occured to me that as this is an exceptional week I could post it today and it wouldn’t have to fit in at all. So here it is…

My own first drafts are often clumsy and confused, and nothing like the finely-honed and incisive fare that is eventually laid before you dear reader.  (Ah yes, antiphrasis is not dead.)  First sentences of first drafts are often nothing more than the manifestation of a pen trying to work out where to go and, more often than not, bear no resemblance whatsoever to what results from and evolves over them.  Is it just me, or is it a stage that all great authors (Still not dead!), must work through?  I took a delve into some working drafts of great opening sentences and this is what I found:

“…It was pissing down and the clock in the Town Hall was buggered again. Winston Smith, his chin tucked down into his new hessian shirt, slipped quickly through the controlled access doors of Loveme Avenue flats as, unaware of his presence, the delivery man came out, but not quick enough to prevent the mechanised lever movement from snipping off the brim of his hat.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, but mostly of his coat. Well, not his really if I’m honest, it was much too big for him as he’d borrowed it from his Big Brother [I wonder what I should call him? I can’t just keep calling him Big Brother, that would be mad.] who was twice his size and actually didn’t mind the cats sleeping on it because they kept the rats off. He hated the rats…”
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty Four.

“…Call me Derek [Kevin?  Maybe something slightly more biblical.  Simon maybe.]  Some years ago – [Never mind how long precisely, it doesn’t matter until I’ve got some kind of idea where I’m going with this] – having little or no money in my purse and nothing much to interest me on shore [Irony: whatever it is, it must be preferable to tar up the crack of his arse and semi-digested weevils baked into his hard tack] I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world [Is ‘see the sea’ too nursery rhyme?  I think I’d like to be allegorical – although I’d better look it up first.  What should I call the whale?  A blubbery white thing.  Donald?]…”
Herman Melville – Moby Dick

“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.  Of course, it did mean that Montag would almost certainly lose his job at the bakery but, hey ho, enjoy it while you can, he thought.  The worse that could happen is that the Fire Brigade would come along and put the fire out…”
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times [depending on your viewpoint I suppose], it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness [although sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart, particularly when they both work for the council], it was the epoch of belief [Do I mean epoch?] it was the epoch of incredulity [Check the thesaurus.  Is there another word for epoch that isn’t age?  Incredulity?  What’s wrong with disbelief?], it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness [should I just say ‘Autumn’?], it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us [like a cheap Chinese buffet], we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way [except for those on the number 13 bus who were going via the shopping centre… Perhaps I should stop writing after I get back from the pub.  I have no idea of where I’m going with this.  Can I base a whole novel on antithesis?  I wonder what I did with that plot about the orphan…]”
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

“Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. ‘Pick me up you little moron,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘Is there any wonder I am a bear of little brain. Look behind you, it’s scattered all over the shagpile. Most of my intellect winds up in the Hoover. Firm, my head used to be, firm, but now it’s got less stuffing than a British Rail Christmas sandwich. My stitching is less reliable than a politician in a crowded corridor…”
A. A. Milne – Winnie the Pooh

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun… [I’m not sure about this.  Is it all just a little bit glib for a GCSE astronomy text book?]”
Douglas Adams – The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy