How do you turn your first drafts into passable prose? Watching out for writing rules that, no matter how hard you protest, you really shouldn’t break if you can help it. And when you’re first starting out, you may not be able to help it at all…

I’m going to come out and say it from the off: your first book will probably not be very good. That is, the first ever story you put fingers to keyboard over. Because, for the most part, this is untamed, uncured material, in which you’ve probably broken a load of laws and rules of the art. And that is totally fine; it’s part of the process. I have defied a number of writing rules myself; sometimes knowingly, other times, not so much. Indeed, even now, there are a fair few things I’d like to change about the work that I’ve since published.

I have always clashed with people who are quick to tear a first draft to shreds, as if it’s meant to be perfect first time around. The maxim I follow for the first draft process is: write with your heart, not your head. Get the story down on the page, and sort it out properly in the re-drafting process. I’ve often found those who don’t do it this way often kill their stories off before they’ve given it a proper chance.

All the same, it never hurts to alert you to some of the common, important writing rules that you may break even without meaning to. I have pinpointed five for the purposes of this article:

FACT DUMPING

Exposition is one of the chief elements of narrative. To give readers information necessary to understanding the characters and the story. However, especially in today’s literature, it ought to be given in moderation. Allow your readers to work more stuff out for themselves than just handing it to them on a platter (which we’ll discuss more further down). Massive blocks of backstory and description can put the modern reader off. There’s not much sense in delivering a lengthy chapter about the main character’s family history if there’s nothing really relevant in it. And if it is crucial to the story, think of another way to deliver the information. Spread it out across a number of smaller scenes, maybe via dialogue or action, for example.

USING ADVERBS

I have highlighted the use of adverbs on this blog before. There are occasions in which to use them is acceptable. If you’re describing the way a character has said something, but there is no specific verb of its own to illustrate it properly, then you have little choice. This is one of the writing rules I have tended to break continually (see — I just did it again). It is a crutch on which writers can lean on in the course of their drafting process. You can always find more interesting verbs or stronger ways to describe speech and action when it comes to editing.

SHOW, DON’T TELL

Prior to doing my Masters in Creative Writing, I used to think the Show, Don’t Tell rule was another one of those pretentious rules that reading addicts created and posted on the Internet to justify why they didn’t like something they read. It turns out this is actually the accepted approach in modern writing. Rather than tell your readers something or other about a character, make them do or say something in order for your readers to analyse it and come to the conclusion themselves. It creates new challenges for you as a writer, but also may open up new avenues in terms of narrative. Your story may go in a different direction to what you had planned.

CHANGING POINT-OF-VIEW / FOCALISER MID-SCENE

Another one I’m guilty of. And while I don’t justify it, I will say, when you read a lot of 18th and 19th century literature, as I do, there are a lot of scenes in which the character whose point-of-view you’re following changes. Sometimes for no significant reason. I’m currently reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment, and I can tell you it happens quite often in that book. At times, it’s a minor, background character, whose perspective we view for a matter of sentences, for no especial reason. Because I was given to understand this as a bad habit, these days, I make sure I have designated a focaliser (or focalisers) for each chapter, and, when I make the switch, I make sure it’s as significant as a chapter break, so that the reader can follow it. Fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire books will know that George R.R. Martin takes it one step further and names the Point-of-View character for each chapter.

In short, try to follow one character’s perspective in a chapter. And if you must have more than one POV, make the switch make sense. When you come to read through your work, you’ll find you may have changed the focaliser without even realising. It’s something to watch out for.

OVERDESCRIBING AND OVEREXPOSING

This calls back to the first point about Fact Dumping. Many of my readers have commended me on my skills in descriptive writing. And it’s true, I do like a rich description for my characters and settings. But even I look back on The Berylford Scandals and recognise that I spent far too long in the opening chapters talking about how the Stirkwhistles looked and acted, instead of letting the narrative do that for me. So, in learning my lesson, for You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic, the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the characters get revealed more gradually as the story goes on. Meanwhile, the initial descriptions are more to-the-point and (hopefully) don’t give too much away. I advise other writers to observe a similar approach. No one needs three adjectives per body part and item of clothing. If you must describe all this from the off, make sure it’s worth the reader’s effort. Otherwise you’re just going to bore them.

 WHAT OTHER WRITING RULES ARE OUT THERE?

Do you know any other rules or laws of writing that get broken, even by total accident? Let me know your pet peeves in the comments section.

In order to craft a fully three-dimensional main character that your readers will want to follow to the end, you need to have these basics in the bag…

A story needs its central character. Or characters, if your story world and narrative are broad enough to encompass more than one point-of-view. With these characters, you ought to be pouring your heart and soul into making them as real as possible. After all, they are who your readers are going to follow throughout your story. Often, your main character (s) will evolve during the writing and development processes. But there are (at least) five things that you ought to have designated before you put fingers to keyboard on their journey. Those things are as follows:

THEIR ROLE IN THE STORY

This might seem an odd and/or self-explanatory place to start. They’re the main character — that’s their role. No — think deeper. Are they a hero or an anti-hero, for example? Are they a romantic lead or a lovable loser? A tragicomic figure or a straight man? Having this down from the beginning will help you formulate their specific characteristics later. Such as their personality, behaviour, and relationships with other characters.

WHAT THEY WANT

I studied theatre in school, and in acting classes, it was often drilled into us the question, “What does your character want?” Stanislavski had a point and it transfers into creating characters in literature too. Your main character needs to have a clear desire or motivation. If I take my current work-in-progress, You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic as an example, the main character Heinrich Oeunhausen wants two things. Most importantly, he wants to protect his wife from the Nazis; his secondary want is to run his business with as little interference as possible.

In knowing what your main characters want, you can generate conflict, a crucial element to any story (and we’ll come to it a bit later in this article). It also leads you to decide how they deal with said wants. How do they go about achieving them? And how do they respond to the challenges along the way? Do they get what they want very easily? If so, how, if at all, do they lose it? It spawns an entire list of questions that, as you answer, you build a fuller, broader picture of both the story and the characters.

WHAT THEIR ARC IS

I have had occasion to refer to the very core basic of storytelling as: your character has a Point A and a Point B. Writing the story is very much a matter of filling in the gap in the middle. How do they get from A to B? It’s a very simplistic way of describing the character arc (or story arc).

In other words, from the beginning you have to know where the character starts and where you want them to end up. Like a lot of things in writing, this will change the further along you go. It isn’t always necessarily a physical destination, either; it can just as easily be a mental or emotional development. In some cases, you may find it fitting that their journey is not so much an arc, but that they come full circle. As long as it is a satisfying payoff, of course.

THEIR CONFLICT

As mentioned before, there is no real story without some form of conflict. I was taught before that The cat sat on the mat is not a story. But The cat sat on the dog’s mat is. Once you’ve fleshed out your main character out a bit, you can designate the conflict in their journey. Who or what is the conflict with? What causes or has caused it? How does it prevent the character from getting what they want?

Again, to refer back to You Can Hear Chopin, Heinrich faces conflict in both his primary and secondary wants. His wife, who is mentally ill, is at constant threat by the Nazis, who just so happen to be frequent guests in Heinrich’s hotel. Indeed, a couple of them are even close friends. With that in mind, his desire to run his business as smoothly as possible is also incommoded by the Nazis’ presence there.

WHAT MAKES THEM… THEM

Okay so maybe this isn’t a majorly important point. However, I think it’s always good to have a recurring motif or behaviour, or a centric personality trait, to help you along in fleshing your main character out. That motif may end up not being massively important in the story, but it helps you towards working out the character’s greater personality. Or it’s a part of their character that your readers can pick up on. I have written Heinrich Oeunhausen as being very conscious of time all the time (in his line of work as a hotel manager, everything has to be on schedule) so I often have him checking his watch. Meanwhile, in the Berylford novels, when designing Abel Stirkwhistle, the first thing I knew about him was that he was bad-tempered and fearsome. So, even before I turned him into the sunken, twisted old man he became, I had him walking around grumbling, grunting, snarling, and so on.

Got any other ideas? Let me know in the comments section. For more author news and views, my Facebook and Instagram pages are here. And drop a subscription to my YouTube channel to remain informed of the latest, plus some exclusives. Furthermore, my fortnightly podcast, The Dale Hurst Writing Show, is available to listen to here on Spotify.