December 2023…
Welcome to my blog.
Blogging is a new experience for me so I’m looking forward to sharing thoughts and experiences about my writing adventure. Through my blog I plan to share thoughts on the development of my writing career, how it has changed me and challenges I have faced to get to a standard of writing craft suitable to disseminate to a wider audience.
I have been reading extensively about writing craft and attending courses for about five years. An aspect of this writerly craft, frequently mentioned, is the need for a central theme. The idea of a central theme seems oddly artificial, as if a writer sits down one day to create a novel and fills in various templates and questionnaires about the impending project; that a writer will have a theme already in mind and that they determinedly force their story to decorate that theme.
I suspect that is not the case. For me and, I guess, many other writers, the initial challenge is to write something – anything – that starts at some point, progresses an ethereal plot idea and stumbles on a conclusion, creating the first draft. Completing a first draft is satisfying in itself; a point of relief. It is only when the draft is re-read, characters are given life and personality, and dramatic action takes place, that an interesting underlying theme emerges. The theme is hidden in the first draft waiting to be discovered and often it turns out to be an expression of one’s own beliefs and standards.
Being an engineer by vocation I often write reports with a distinct structure and purpose. It has been pleasantly surprising to embark on a session of writing before a story idea is fully formed. Launching into a story with a half-baked starting point and letting the natural progression of ideas lead the story forward has been a liberating experience. Writing by hand enhances this progression of themes and ideas – the pace of applying pen to paper is slow enough to allow thoughts of logical progressions to emerge. Why are characters behaving as they do? What are they feeling at a particular point in the story? What would they reasonably do next?
I regularly write submissions for the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Furious Fiction competition to develop this trait; writing to theme and time constraints, taking the plunge with an incompletely formed story and seeing what turns out. The end of the first draft reveals potential themes from which the story can be strengthened, characters can be made more distinct and other writerly aspects can be addressed to produce the best version of the story.
The completion of the first draft is satisfying, and forms the framework from which a great story can emerge. But the first draft isn’t complete until you make a start.