Well, it’s been a few weeks since I abandoned most of a draft of The Princess Protection Program #2 and started again with a different plot and a different central dramatic argument so it seemed like I should check in on how things were going.
I’m shocked to say, it’s going well!
I’m about to finish the first draft early this week and I feel pretty good about it (for a first draft). I’m extra excited because that will also free me to work on the next thing, the thing that I really started this newsletter to talk about.
It’s amazing how the story started to flow once I got my character’s drive right, which then gave me a clear sense of the journey I wanted to send her on. It’s been, dare I say, fun?
I was torturing myself with the last draft, the one I abandoned, and this one has been a joy to write…which is a helpful reminder to seek out the joy in your creative work, even when it’s your bill-paying work too. I had to remind myself to play…write the jokes that made me laugh, write the scenes that were fun to write just because they were fun to write, make myself feel instead of just finish. And it worked!
But it also worked, I think, because I did the work. I had to write most of the bad draft I abandoned in order to get to this draft. And then I had to do some hard (but also fun!) soul searching about why this book and what I wanted to say and how this story could dramatize the saying of it. Of course, a lot of that work looks like stating out windows or taking walks and thinking. But thinking is the work.
Anyway, this exercise was useful to me as re-conceived this book, so I thought it might be helpful to you writers out there too.
For your work-in-progress, ask yourself:
What is my Central Dramatic Argument?
This can be anything that interests you! We can’t save ourselves without saving each other Or Love between friends is the deepest love of all Or Your Family Is Why You’re Nuts
For the Princess Protection Program 2, I landed on You can only be free of your past mistakes by facing them
From there, think about your protagonist and how, at the start of your story, the day it begins, they are living the opposite of that argument. They don’t accept its truth and won’t follow its dictates…they are in opposition to what the story gods want them to know (You! You’re the story gods!)
Now, as the writer, how can you make the world of your story—the situations, the other characters, the power structures of their world, whatever—push them out of the world view they’re living in and force them to accept the truth of your argument. What happens to force your character to learn?
The moment I focused on this—what do I want my character to learn, how can I teach it to her in the most entertaining way possible—I was off ! It flew! And when I got stuck in a scene, I was able to ask myself, what does she think of this? Is she accepting of what she needs to know here? Is she acting against the story gods (always I wanted the answer to be ‘yes’ and then to punish her for it! So she can learn at the climax of the story!)
Anyway, that’s all. Writing’s going well and if you write, I hope it is for you too, however you get there. The process can be messy, and change from project to project, but when it works, it feels pretty great.