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Re-visioning

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Re-visioning

Unless a writer is diligent about saving the latest edits of a project to an entirely new file, one draft of a piece will blur into another, leaving no paper trail behind.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  But recent events in my writing life made me think back to my freshman composition class where my instructor, Mr. George McCaulley, insisted that we tackle our papers for him in this way:

    First Draft:  A fairly polished essay or report addressing a given theme or subject.

    Second Draft:  Another polished draft attacking the subject with a completely new approach or perspective.  (Ideally, the second draft would share few words with the first.)

    Final Draft:  A synthesis bringing the best of the two drafts together.

To my 18-year old brain, the odd requirement of writing a completely different second draft seemed time-consuming and useless.  I was accustomed to writing a rough draft, changing a few sentences here or there for clarity, and then heading for the typewriter in order to produce a legible, final draft.   (Yes, typewriter.  For me, the mighty PC sea change occurred between my freshman and senior year in college.)  But since Mr. McCaulley made it clear that part of our grade depended on how different the first draft was from the second, I was forced to comply.

A few weeks ago I noticed that I had unwittingly reinvented Mr. McCaulley's process as I pursued major revisions to the first novel I ever attempted.  I knew that if I kept all my characters the same, I would wind doing minor edits for word choice, punctuation, and grammar instead of using some of the new writing skills I’d picked up over the years.  I had seen a few years ago that new and interesting avenues of thought, conversation and action opened up when I changed the antagonist of a story into its protagonist.  This time, instead of switching to another viewpoint character, I changed the heroine's family background.  This has brought about a true McCaulley second draft--a complete revision with no more than a few snatches of dialogue in common with its predecessor.  At least so far.

In this case, the eventual final draft will probably be much more similar in tone, style and content to the second draft, but it will still be a synthesis.  I plan to check over the original material to make sure that I didn't leave any interesting perspectives behind.  I don’t recommend this approach for every project.  It’s horrendously time-consuming.  But I’m hoping that in this case it won’t be entirely useless.