Writing In Three Directions at Once

Progress, Breadth, and Depth and the iterative first draft

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

Drafting a novel is a non-linear process. Shocking, I know. I’m sure your mind is blown by my statement of the obvious.

But more and more I’m coming to realize how very non-linear it is. Non-linear in ways I didn’t ever think of before. And I’m talking about first-drafting. The draft which (according to the current received wisdom) you’re supposed to race through. Just get it down! Write to the end! Tell yourself the story! Write a shitty first draft (thank you Annie Lamott). Don’t edit in process!

All this advice favors one dimension of a draft over all the others: progress, or the beginning-to-end movement. But progress is only one dimension, and not necessarily the most important one. I’m finding, as I work on my current draft, that I’m aware of the other dimensions in a way I wasn’t before. I’d worked with them. I knew they were there the way you know where your body is in space, but I couldn’t name them.

So I’m going to take a stab at naming them.

Three Dimensions

Progress: This is the forward motion of the book—the cause-and-effect pathway and the way all the other threads weave around it. It’s the growing word-count. The great arc, at the end of which you get to write The End.

Breadth: This is the meta scope of the book. What are you, the author, getting yourself into with this book? It may be a deep dive into a historical period, a close examination of the dissolution of a marriage, a biting social satire, a fully-realized alternate world where the forces of good and evil do battle. Etc. etc. etc. What’s your theme or ‘moral argument’? What and how much are you trying to get your arms around?

Depth: This is the personal, inner dimension. How deep are you going with these specific, unique characters. This is where you break out your favorite resource for character building and really drill down into why characters are the way they are. Prosaically called character development, it’s more than that, because how deep you go with one character affects how deep you go with all of them. It’s your sense of scale with the whole cast, and your awareness of how big your range of depth is. Perhaps, like Jane Austen, you love writing one deeply known character surrounded by a lot of characters who are, shall we say, entertaining but less worth knowing. Or perhaps you want to give the reader at least a glimpse into the vast inner life of every character. Either way, or in between, this is the Depth dimension of a draft.

Three Directions at Once

In response to the sometimes overwhelming chorus singing, just finish it! I would like to point out that we are writing in three directions at once. It may seem that if we start with progress and just get to the end, we can do breadth and depth later. But breadth and depth will change progress, and this is where you get the situation (which I am in right now) where you cut ten thousand words of progress when you realize that some other aspect of the book isn’t working or has changed.

In my case, I cut those words without regret because I found myself in the middle of the book not knowing my character as well as I wanted to. I felt like I was writing blind, moving a story forward, but not sure it was her story. So I stepped back and worked on Depth. I dug into what was really rankling her at her core. The thing she had to spend the entire book working through. And when I did that, she grew. She changed. And the other dimensions changed too.

(Here’s another thing I learned in the process. If you can cut an aspect of one dimension—a character feature for example—and it doesn’t really affect the other two dimension of the book, then it probably wasn’t the strongest bit of story-craft and maybe deserved to go.)

Understanding the interplay between these three dimensions of a draft has helped me understand my own maddeningly illogical, spiral process. It goes like this: I write some stuff. Then I go back, fix a few sentences, tweak the timeline, then write some more stuff. Then maybe I’ll realize a minor character is becoming more of a major character, so I’ll go back and weave them into the story more. Then I’ll make progress again, then I’ll realize there’s a theme (breadth) that has been right in front of my face all this time, and I want to make sure it’s showing up earlier, and I’ll go back and weave it in. Then I’ll write some more (progress). Then I’ll get all fired up about a certain aspect of a character’s inner life I’ve just discovered(depth) that feels like yes, this is how it should have been all along! And I’ll go back and weave that in. Each time I go back and forth like this, it’s like traveling another round of an ever-expanding spiral. Every time I back up and work my way through the story again, I come back to where I was, but the story is broader and deeper. And better.

Writing in three directions at once creates a constant tension in my drafting process. It can activate my inner analytical mind, which then goes and rousts my inner critic out of her slumber (who am I kidding, she never sleeps) and sets me up for perfectionism. But is also challenges me and keeps me interested and produces what I consider best about my work.

One last thing

In the end, here’s the one thing I’ll give to progress: if one is forever working on breadth and depth, one will never finish. Progress is the one dimension you must pursue if you ever hope to write something you can call a book.

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