Focus

If you are writing a raw first draft for NaNoWriMo, go back to writing. Do feel free to bookmark this post and come back to it in December, or better yet, January, with your completed draft. My next few posts will contain advice for revising broad structural elements of your story.

What’s your focus?

Everything you write will have a natural focus. The raw draft of your story will naturally use more of one element of storytelling than others. This is because we tend to draw on conscious details and forget about the unconscious things we take in when experiencing our own lives, and most people write exactly the same way they live.

We are drawn to things that interest us or that we are comfortable processing. If you’re swept up in city life, it will be hard to see the things that truly make up a small town setting. More personally, if you have no interest in fashion, you might never describe what a person is wearing beyond “a t-shirt and jeans.” A hard of hearing person isn’t going to notice sounds as much as movement; a person with difficulties seeing things is going to notice the cadence and tone in what people say before they see the place setting on the table in front of them. If you have lots of friends and are extroverted, it is difficult to imagine life as an introvert as anything other than a misery. But I promise you, as an introvert, the way I spend my day, or even think about it, may be different, but it is very enjoyable.

So let’s take a look at how this natural focus affects a first draft.

If you find you’re sharing a lot about your characters’ internal thoughts, your natural focus is interested in how people “work”, human psychology, the struggle within self, or change, or how humans feel about, face, and overcome the problems within their lives or their world. Your focus is therefore on theme, the message you’re trying to convey to readers. Too much, however, and your story becomes “preachy” and, while there is a market for that, you may want your story to be a more subtle share.

Or maybe your raw draft has a lot of physical description. Of the characters, of the setting, of their actions. Your focus here was on making readers see the story – you may enjoy when a reviewer says they could see the story “playing in their head.” This focus is great for action-centered stories: suspense, thriller, epic battles and magical duels. It’s less helpful if the story you want to tell is about interior transformation: a coming of age story, a life transition, or a moral dilemma. Too much physical description can also lead to the plot-dragging condition called “info dump.”

Or perhaps your raw draft has a lot of dialogue. Your characters are telling each other (most) everything: what’s happening, what’s happened, what they’re planning, etc. When every paragraph, or nearly so, begins or ends with quotation marks or is formatted as a text message or email, you can accidentally leave out a lot of the story, or make it feel to a reader like no one is moving around. “Talking heads” often undercuts the dramatic opportunities to make readers wonder, worry, and turn the page.

Or perhaps everything the characters think is on the page, or there’s lots of flashbacks. Lots of italicized text might be conveying information to the reader, but the same information isn’t being shared with other characters. That’s character-based info dump and just as bad and draggy as a history info dump in descriptive narrative. Yes, internal dialogues may bring the reader closer to characters. But like too much spoken dialogue, you can lose forward momentum on the central plot, and have readers who think the characters are not moving around much.

Bringing Balance

If your raw draft is unbalanced, too focused on one of these ways, to broaden your story’s appeal, and tell a more complete journey, you should consider ways to incorporate missing or diminished elements. If you can, “consciously” look around the scene for the elements you missed. Add more movement of the characters around the room as they speak their dialogue. Add more ambient sounds – the radio playing in the background, birdsong on the jogging trail, the hum of people talking to the waitstaff at a nearby table, etc – to the scene.

Change the mode

You can change the mode – the method the information gets to the reader and/or other characters. Change inner dialogue to spoken dialogue. Reduce the description to only the relevant scenery that the character interacts with. You can show instead of tell history by describing a single monument in place of multiple paragraphs about the four generations of events that brought the current situation to this point.

You also won’t know how a small change will improve the story until you try it. Change one sentence. Replace one “standard” “hey, how are you” text message with how the character feels that the other one reached out. Shorten a setting description from three paragraphs to one, removing the details that aren’t relevant to that precise story moment.

Now, read the paragraphs or the scene again. I’m willing to bet the pacing will have changed, become less draggy, more active, more interesting.

~ Lara