Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 21: Should I Write in Drafts?

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published only three months later. He didn’t complete the book

until November of 1850, so that the public had already started

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o This means that Dickens never did more than one complete draft

of 'DYLG&RSSHU¿HOG, and it means that he must have thought

the novel through in great detail before he started writing.

o Dickens may have done drafts of individual chapters or

sections; he certainly rewrote things as he went along; and

it’s entirely possible that he may have changed his mind about

the later chapters that he had outlined but hadn’t written yet.

But Dickens didn’t have the option of making changes to the

chapters that had already been published.

o That may have handicapped him as far as plotting went, but

even so, much of Dickens’s work has an irresistible narrative

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and partly a product of how he wrote the books—on deadline, a

chapter at a time, just two weeks ahead of the printer.

z The commercial realities

of publishing serial

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affected the daily creative

process of writers,

dictating that books

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without repeated drafts.

In our own time, changes

in technology have also

caused changes in the

way writers compose a

whole narrative.

o Many writers

who once wrote

Writing by hand is more time consuming than

typing on a computer, but it can be a fruitful

way to make yourself slow down and think

about what you’re trying to accomplish.

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