So far, I’ve discussed how I’ve started to look at writing stories, and a way to prepare to write a first draft and how to edit it once it’s in existence.

(As for how to make the first draft? Just type!)

Here’s how I’ve developed this way of writing, and why I think it works.

Last year, I started sending stories to the most prestigious mags I could find. This made me terrified of writing badly. Especially if I combined this with reading the magazines while writing a first draft. “Look at this garbage I’m writing compared to what these writers are capable of!” I thought.

Anyway, my fear of bad writing meant that when I’d written what I thought was a finalised story, I didn’t want to probe it too hard lest it fall apart.

I also came up with the idea that preparing as much as possible before starting a story made me a bad writer.

I was probably thinking of this quote: “[Chekhov’s] friend and fellow writer Vladimir Korolenko wrote in his memoirs that when asked how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object – an ashtray – and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called The Ashtray, he could have it the next morning.”

I’m willing to bet Chekhov spent most of that day taking notes though! Doing a bit of free association, thinking of the role of ashtrays in his life. Did anything curious happen to him involving an ashtray, or when one was in the room? What is his opinion of them, of smokers?

Ray Bradbury did the same thing. He started off writing stories starting from just the titles. So I thought, “This is how you’re supposed to find the good stories.”

I do think the best moments of my writing come straight from the subconscious. When I’m writing a first draft, they’re when the story seems to “take off”, writes itself without me. (I hope you’ve had this feeling! It’s the best.) They’re the parts of my writing that even I can’t explain. But when I look back on when those moments occurred, they were when I’d finally found the time to write a story I was super excited about, because I strongly suspected that it led somewhere interesting. I’d been thinking about the story, or the topic the story is about, for months—not consciously, just in the back of my mind along with all my other thoughts. All those cumulative fragments of thought poured out for those stories. However, conscious effort, in the form of preparation, can be done to increase the chance of a first draft “taking off.”

This emphasis on preparation is present in this blog post, which is one of the best things I read about writing last year.

His advice about the characters didn’t quite click for me, which is why I prefer to think of story preparation as a series of questions to answer, rather than real people to interrogate.

I even have another dry scientific analogy here!

Crystallisation is when solid crystals come out of a solution. This can be done “spontaneously”, just by waiting in hope that crystals will appear in the right conditions; or, by the introduction of “seed crystals.” Seed crystals are small crystals of whatever compound is in the solution, and they’re added so the crystallisation process has something to grab onto. This is a much faster process!

So, if you make a small version of “story stuff” before you begin the story creation process, you will create the story faster.

This isn’t the same as predetermining where the story should go. Having a planned trajectory, so you don’t go nuts in every direction, is placing a seed crystal in a solution. You might get there without it, but you’ll get there faster and with less effort if you have a good seed 😊

Back to these stories I sent out. If anyone was kind enough to give me a personal rejection, they suggested parts that didn’t work, that didn’t make sense, and the ways the story could be improved.

Very important: if those improvements resonate with you, if they were things you had half-suspected yourself or that make sense in retrospect, you can apply them. If they don’t, don’t bother with them.

The more comments you get, the higher chance that some of them won’t apply to what you were trying to do. Because the more comments there are, the likelier it is that you didn’t get as close as you thought you had—or that an enthusiastic editor is shaping your work in their vision.

Even better, if you train yourself to ask the right questions about your manuscript, you can answer them before anyone else has the chance to ask. Whatever you have in-house can be as bad as you like. Who cares?!

Much of the material I wrote in shaky deer-mode is still with me. No one yet wants it! And when I revisited it with my new “curiosity-exhausting” method, a whole string of questions popped up.

Revising is a weird sensation. You’re correcting what you saw the characters first do, and the world they did it in. Maybe even the outcome of their whole adventure. But as you do it, you can feel the meaning of the text expanding, resonating more deeply, becoming more what it was destined to be overall.

I’ve not yet found a weakness in a story of mine that wasn’t also a previously hidden opportunity to make it stronger than I had imagined.

When I started writing something new after developing this idea, I was more willing to change the components as I was writing it. The closer I got to the end, the more I could tell what was and wasn’t needed.

This openness to change has left me with a first draft that appears much closer to the end product. As I wrote, the changes I made got smaller, more specific, fewer. I was iterating towards a correct solution.

One of the stories I repaired this way, which was rejected a handful of times, has now been shortlisted by a fairly reputable mag. That at least means someone will take it as is—or someone else will after a few more passes through. It definitely means I did a good job! (And if you want to keep writing, you’ll have to start celebrating more than just those rare acceptances.)

In the last blog post in this series, I’ll offer some ways that you can expand this analogy and what to take away from reading other people’s writing. Thanks for reading this far!