A Creative Rebel's Guide to Writing Amazing Fiction by Meghan March

Author:Meghan March [March, Meghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781943796557
Publisher: The Creative Rebel Company

* * *

The Quality of Your Drafting

As a lawyer drafting and negotiating contracts nearly every day for eight years, I learned something really important. A contract can be drafted in a manner that leads to it being ugly, good, great, or elegant.

When you read an ugly contract, you know it. It gets the job done, but it’s not pretty. It’s like a ham-handed brute bludgeoned the concept you’re trying to articulate into words. A good contract isn’t ugly. A great contract is better than good. But an elegant contract, something I didn’t even know could exist until I started working at a Fortune 50 company with lawyers who charged over a thousand dollars per hour, is on an altogether different level of creation and beauty. Complicated concepts are expressed simply, clearly, and beautifully. There’s no question of the meaning of these complex situations because the contract was drafted with such thought, precision, and intentionally selected word choice that the exercise is taken to a totally different level. As odd as it sounds, it’s truly a beautiful thing to witness, especially if all you’ve ever seen are ugly, good, and great contracts. I suppose you might have to draft and negotiate contracts almost daily for eight years to appreciate such a thing, but it taught me a valuable lesson that I carried over into my fiction.

As a reader and a writer, you’re going to notice that books can be drafted in a manner that is ugly, good, great, or elegant. There are plenty of good stories that are written in a way that’s just ugly. Sure, there are words on a page, but they’re not pretty. They don’t transport you to a different place or an alternate reality. You have to pick your way through the story to try to get to the point rather than allowing yourself to be consumed by the story.

With good drafting, you can get lost in the story. With great drafting, you can watch it more easily as a movie in your head. But occasionally, you find a story that is drafted so elegantly that you feel totally and completely inadequate as a writer and a storyteller. Those are the best stories to read to improve your drafting. Instead of allowing it to make you feel like you should never bother to write another book again for the rest of your life—and we’ve all felt that—you should take notes and learn from it.

Your drafting can always get better. There are always parts of the process where you get lazy. We can’t help it. Writing books is a lot of work. Drafting amazing fiction elegantly … whoa, buddy. That’s a lifelong goal you can work on daily.

The books that sell the most copies won’t always be the best stories or the best written books. It’s a fact. There are tons of factors that go into book sales, and often, the quality of the drafting isn’t one of them. That’s good for a lot of us though, I suppose.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.