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SECOND DRAFT NOVEL AND SCRIPT COURSE - 12 MONTHS
To
write a professional story is going to take more than one draft.
You don’t need a perfect First Draft
to start your Second Draft.
In
the First Draft you learnt all about story structure and found the best
story you're capable of writing.
In
the Second Draft you'll nail that story down so that it works from beginning
to end.
You
will turn a good first draft into a great second draft.
In most cases, the second draft will be twice as good as the
first.
THE
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A FIRST DRAFT AND A SECOND DRAFT COURSE
The Second Draft is a very different process to the First Draft Course.
You have much more control over your story. And most people get very excited
when they see the possibility their first drafts have created for a second
draft.
The
first draft is for exploring and discovering the story you want to write.
The
Second Draft is about systematically nailing your story down until
your have a draft that works from beginning to end.
This
process will enable you to write the best story you are capable of
writing in a way that is efficient, stimulating and fun. In most cases,
the second draft will be twice as good as the first.
It
is an extremely satisfying part of the process of completing your
novel or screenplay and is free of much of the angst that can be attached
to a first draft as the possibilities of your stories become apparent.
"The
idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.
This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific
third drafts. The fist draft is the child's draft where
you let it all pour out. The second draft is the up draft
where you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say
more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft
where you check every tooth.".
Anne Lamott
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THE
SECOND DRAFT
You have explored the possibilities of your story and written an imperfect
first draft. But you are now in a position to nail it down and make it
work from beginning to end.
The
first step in the Second Draft is to find the spine of your story
that realises the potential of your first draft. You will be amazed
at how good this will be. Invariably it exceeds the writer's expectations.
You
will then work through your Second Draft one step, one scene, one
word at a time. The time it takes to complete your story will vary
depending on the length of your story and the time you have available
to work on it. The minimum you should do is ten scenes a fortnight.
Ideally,fifteen.
THE
GOAL
The goal is to write a story that will have readers/audiences wanting
to know what happens next while taking your main character on an emotional
and spiritual journey of change.
You
really don't know the potential of your story until you have got to the
end of the process.
HOW
THE COURSE WORKS
The course runs over twelve months. It commences with one full
day, then on every alternate week there is a two and a half hour session.
Part
One: Find the spine of the story
Spend a day doing a series of exercises to identify and clarify the
Seven-Turning Point spine of your story that will guide the whole second
draft process.
To
do this you:
- Answer
a series of questions to explore the possibilities of your story.
- Then
synthesize that structure down into an organic step outline.
- This
will break it down into a form that has a story logic that will
work.
- Then
identify your seven turning points.
It
may evolve slightly, but this spine will be the essential framework
of the story you want to tell.
Part
Two: Writing and Re-writing
You will then systematically work
through each of the seven Turning Points so that your story realises
its full dramatic potential.
Each
turning point is broken into steps, sequences and scenes. This ensures
your story works as an integrated whole and enables you to build the
emotion, drama and theme of your story so that it realises its full
dramatic potential.
By breaking your story down at these levels you maximise the emotional
impact, character growth and drama of your story.
This
will ensure your story is on track and maximise the dance between imagination
and structure.
In
the live course, we meet once a fortnight for two and a half hours.
It is very hands on focusing on the structure. No quotes, no film clips
etc.
In
the online course, you work very much at your own pace, but you must
complete the process within the twelve months.
The essence of second draft structure
Character and structure are two sides of the same coin. One exists to
reveal the other.
For each section you first work out what the character growth is.
You
then find the dramatic actions that put pressure on your character
to create that growth. Action reveals character. This is an organic
process which takes time to master.
Class Writing Exercises
As
well as focusing on the structure, In each class you will also do a
series of writing exercises that will develop your connection with
your characters’ emotion
and voice.
The
exercises will improve your writing and enable you to really develop
and dig deep into the pysche of your characters and deepen their character
arc.
COURSE
DETAILS
SUNDAY September 7, 2008 from 10.30am to 4.30pm
then
SUNDAY September 21, 2008 from 11.30am to 4.30pm
These are the two
full days. Then we meet for two and a half hour sessions every other week
on either a:
Tuesday evening from 6.30pm to 9.00pm
or
Saturday morning from 10.30pm to 1.00pm
Plus an interactive Online
Component.
We
recommend that you spend 20 to 60 min a day, 4-5 days a week preparing
and writing scenes.
Pre-requisite:
First
Draft Course
Course
fee: $3,295. Please contact Kathleen
to discuss earlybird of $300 off and/or payment options.
THE
THREE DRAFTS
The first draft is about discovering the possibilities of your story.
The second draft is the process of refining your story so that it
works from beginning to end.
The
third draft is when you focus on the writing and making sure that
each scene, indeed every word works.
"First
draft and revision are so different they hardly seem to belong
to the same activity. I never do any research until the first
draft is finished; all that matters to begin with is the flow,
the story, the narrating. Research material and outlines are
then like swimming in a straight jacket."
John Fowles |
Before
you give your work to an agent, publisher or producer you need to make
it as good as it possibly can be. You may need to get a professional editor
to read your manuscript and make sure everything works in terms of continuity,
spelling, punctuation and grammar. You will then need to put those suggestions
in place.
You will then be ready to find an agent, publisher or producer.
TESTIMONIALS FOR THE 2ND DRAFT COURSE
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"What I've learnt about the process of writing from doing the Second Draft Course is to get the spine of the story down in the turning points so the whole story works as a structure and then to fit in the steps and sequences in between. The second draft process nails the structure and makes the story follow as a logical sequence (in comparison to the first draft which is more exploratory and about identifying the storyline). The second draft crystallizes the structure."
Margie Yen
"Second drafts are enormously easier than the first draft. Second drafts are about the 80/20 tweaks required to get the story structure right. Second drafts are not about setting out on some hopeless, aimless journey with no end in sight and hoping you arrived unscathed with the beginnings of a book under one arm. First Draft anxiety level = 7/10. Second draft = 4/10. This time I am confident that a) I am getting somewhere and b) it is better than the time before. I am noticing the quality of the writing improve as the characters emerge and the plot crystallizes."
Emma Beames
"Write junk, get down the bones, who were they kidding? My story was going to be the "one" that was near perfect the first time round. Now here I sit with 20% of that perfect piece. Like anything worthwhile quality counts, not quantity, with a shared experience ie: "no one has kept even 50% of their original," it hasn't been hard to let go and move on. Don't agonise, you're wasting pen time. The experience of the 2nd draft course is more enjoyable, less fretful and, most importantly, a real living thing."
Deborah Deering
"A lump of cold hard clay beneath my eager fingers. I've got the clay, dug it out of the ground like a big gold nugget, (first draft), and now it's time to shape it, (second draft). My hands run over and around the shiny, or is that slimy surface? I contemplate shape, design, purpose. I begin to mould the blob, the good blob, the blob full of potential, the substance into something more, something with harder edges, but softer lines, into something more balanced, now that I understand how the clay bends, how it can be manipulated, how I can make it turn tricks for me, know I'm closer to knowing what it will be. It's exciting and thrilling, a more definite way of working, of creating with design."
Caroline Gerard
The second draft has made me acutely aware of the gaps in my story, things I thought I'd deal with later. Well, later is now and I have to deal with them before I move on. The clear methodical spine in the second draft has been instrumental in highlighting, sometimes in an acutely uncomfortable way, what works and what doesn't. But in the process I've discovered new characters, new motivations, depth to both people and situations that wasn't there before. It's a challenge, but it's also lots of fun."
Jan Christie
"The first pleasant revelation when I began the Second Draft Course was that there was actually a story there. During the course of writing the first draft I felt like I was meandering blindly down a river and I had no sense that I was creating a coherent story. In the first second draft class, we laid out the skeletons of our story and a clear coherent tale had emerged. I realised that the first draft helped me to come up with the geography of my story but that the details of the landscape had to be crafted anew. So I began the story from scratch again, scene 1, line 1, word one. It is so much better than my first draft was and now the road is much straighter and easier to negotiate."
Kim Williams
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RE-WRITING
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"Finishing
a first draft doesn't make you a novelist. Anyone can do the rough
draft of a novel and it probably won't look much worse than the
first draft of any good novel you can name.
The
difference between anyone and a serious writer is re-writing, re-writing
and more re-writing, some times over a period of years. I can't
emphasise strongly enough how important this is, that writing leads
to writing, that failed attempts lead to eventual success, that
the solution of writing problems is made up of all the attempts
that lead nowhere.
The
trouble is that when you're just beginning to write, you may believe
that words committed to paper are sacred, fixed immutable. But you're
not dealing with a finished, printed, copyrighted book, only with
an idea, a pile of words that change shape many times before they
take shape as a book."
Dorothy Bryant
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WRITING
IS A PROCESS
Lesson
From Good Will Hunting by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
The first draft was a 1500 page thrill a minute save the world movie.
They cut this into a workable script (120 pages) and took it to a studio.
Rob
Reiner, who directed When Harry Met Sally,
suggested they change the script and focus on the relationships.
They
spent a year doing re-writes, including a number of off the wall versions.
"We would have done Boogie Nights if we'd thought of it," said
co-writer Ben Affleck.The film was made and won the Oscar for Best Original
Screenplay.
OTHER
THOUGHTS ON THE PROCESS
| "Here's
how you write a play. You do a lot of writing to figure out what
the hell the play's about and throw away three quarters of that
and write it again and find out what that play's about and throw
out three-quarters of it and write it again."
David Mamet
"Write
several openings to the same story. Don't consciously judge these
openings. Instead keep producing variations. Once you've done this
a few times you'll become quite adept at producing these by merely
methodically moving through the possibilities. And inevitably one
of the variations will click, and you'll feel a sense of rightness
and eagerness - yes this is it. That is one of the major pleasures
in writing fiction."
Nancy Kress
"There's
not much that I like better than to take a story that I've had around
the house for a while and work it over again...It doesn't take long
to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one
sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of
a story. I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never
less than 10 or 12. It's instructive and heartening both, to look
at the early drafts of great writers... Tolstoy went through and
re-wrote War and Peace eight times and was still making corrections
in the galley. Things like this should hearten every writer whose
first drafts are dreadful, like mine are."
Raymond Carver
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FOUR
IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER
Excellence is a commitment to completion. If you want to write, the
only failure is stopping.
Persistence
outstrips all other virtues.
Writing
is a process. Enjoy the process.
Your story will evolve over the course of the process. You will not know
whether it is any good until you have completed the process. Don't judge
yourself or your work until you have finished the process.
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"Very few writers really know what they're doing until they've
done it."
Anne Lamott
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See
Testimonials
To
see a slideshow overview of the Online Course click slideshow. You
can adjust the buttons at the bottom of your screen to fit your screen
and how you view it.
To
see a slideshow overview of the Live Course click slideshow. You
can adjust to fit your screen and how you view it.
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