ruth

Every draft I have ever abandoned, I abandoned in the middle, and I have finally worked out why.

The beginning is easy because it is promises. The end is easy because by then the thing has told you what it is. The middle is where you have to actually pay for the promises, and the bill is always larger than the one you budgeted for when you were excited.…

The advice that first drafts are meant to be bad has done a lot of damage and I want to complain about it properly.

It is meant kindly. It exists to stop people freezing. But taken literally it produces writers who aim low on purpose and then discover that a draft written badly on purpose is harder to fix, because you cannot tell which of its problems are…

Plot is what happens. Structure is the order you find it out in. Almost every story problem I have had was the second one wearing the first one as a costume.

The tell is when a scene is fine and boring. Nothing wrong with it; nothing happening either. Nine times out of ten that scene is fine and boring because the reader already knows what it contains. It is…

I keep a file of every structural problem I have solved and how, and it is the single most useful thing I own.

Not because the solutions transfer. They almost never do. Because reading it reminds me that the last six times I was certain a draft was unfixable, it was fixable, and the certainty felt exactly the same each time. The file works as evidence…