Developing Knives: An journey in self editing

You need to understand that I love this short story because Erica is very easily my favourite character I've ever written for so many reasons. In fact, through the many drafts of The Burning Throne she has remained pretty consistent throughout the many changes to that manuscript. Considering how much interest their is with a particular thing called a creative process, I thought I would share mine for my short story Knives which you should read it after this. With no further ado, let us gets started. To make this easier, I will ensure to color code what was added between each draft. At the end, you'll be able to download the development version.

Draft One: An idea

This draft was particularly messy and I was meaning it to be. you might think that wanting a messy first draft doesn't many any sense because there is no point to having a messy final product, but I need to say this: the journey from first draft to final product includes a lot of changes. I'd advise to make sure you're telling yourself the story first of all and then you can make it have some sense later. A blank page can always be edited, but you can't edit a blank page. there are two parts of the first draft that I want to highlight as particular areas for improvement in future drafts:

This, as I'm sure you can see needs more drama. Whilst the setting is down, I need somehow to inject more drama into this specific scene and place Erica right into the action and weave setting into the action. She is staring at the armor deciding how she should proceed. Whilst this is a scene which has a lot of choices and weighing up and little bits of dialogue,

There is a dramatic flair and that is the key to writing a good scene. As my Creative Writing lecturer keeps on saying: 'milk the drama for all you can',

This second extract is quite dialouge heavy and needed more formatting in the final product. As I'm sure you can see, reading this, it could benifit from some dramatic prolonging andd the changes with lighting in some places. When writing a short story, make sure to milk everything you can from your set peices but don't make it too long as your readers won't care if you describe every spec of dust. I think this conversation could have done with some flaring up in the second draft.

Draft Two: A more refined idea

This second draft was slightly less messy and a few more bits of dialogue were added in to act as 'connection points' as the dialogue felt quite hard to follow so I needed to add some dialogue tags into it as well as further conversation to make it make sense.

This makes the story feel more alive by having a more tutor-led version of Edward coming through, as the harder version has slightly dissipated. I wanted Edward to be firm, but kind and I hope that readers got that impression from this piece of work.

At this stage in the process, I quite like the content. Most of the work, now, is more of the mathematical side of things. Considering how many words go onto the page and using page breaks to effectively ramp up the tension and make the reader want to keep reading. This leads onto...

The Third Draft: Maths, tension and looking nice

A lot of the final part of the journey is writing with the point to make it the most engaging I can using the writer's least favorite word: math. Math, here, is to do with how many words are on a page and getting specific words to end it and to make the most dramatic moment at the bottom of the page to get you to turn it. I'm very evil. I hope you enjoy the story none the less!

Enjoyed this breakdown? You're welcome to click some of the other posts below if you liked this one. Read at your pleasure, or peril.